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Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

#31

Post by 0b01 »

switz wrote: post #24

The one that blew my mind when I was in college was a simplified version of quicksort in Haskell. It's just so elegant and clean. quicksort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a] quicksort [] = [] quicksort (p:xs) = (quicksort lesser) ++ [p] ++ (quicksort greater) where lesser = filter ( = p) xs Now surely someone may come along and point out how this isn't a true quicksort[0] because it doesn't partition the elements in place, but…

This may be an elegant piece of code at first glance except the niceties of quicksort such as cache locality and stability come entirely from the in-placeness of the partition procedure.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

#32

Post by canada_dry »

seisvelas wrote: post #3
canada_dry wrote: post #2

https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging This python code was part of the imaging, analysis, and simulation software for radio interferometry that led to the historical first 'image' of a black hole.

What about the code did you find so striking? Any part in particular you recommend checking out?

Overall I refer to it as a good example of relatively complex - yet highly readable - python code.

It's utterly digestable due to its use of meaningful variable names, logical breakdown of functions and absence of 'clever' nontrivial one-liners.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

#33

Post by segmondy »

Exploit codes are often the most beautiful code I read, they are usually small and take some dazzling brilliance to push the computer and make it do what it wasn't.

I can remember the first code that showed how to exploit IFS, race conditions via symlink, the classic "smashing the stack", RTM's worm.

Beauty of a code to me has nothing to do with the formatting, comments, documentations, but everything to do with the mind that bent it into place. Most of the beautiful code I have ever seen would be classified as ugly, spaghetti, not production worthy.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

#34

Post by fdsdsa_7777 »

switz wrote: post #24

The one that blew my mind when I was in college was a simplified version of quicksort in Haskell. It's just so elegant and clean. quicksort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a] quicksort [] = [] quicksort (p:xs) = (quicksort lesser) ++ [p] ++ (quicksort greater) where lesser = filter ( = p) xs Now surely someone may come along and point out how this isn't a true quicksort[0] because it doesn't partition the elements in place, but…

I won't comment on how quicksort-y this is, but the combination of pattern matching and recursion is bread-and-butter Haskell. A number of seemingly complex algorithms can be implemented in a similar way.

Having said that, it is elegant and clean and -- taken by itself -- does make Haskell very attractive.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

#35

Post by fdsdsa_7777 »

symisc_devel wrote: post #16

The SQLite source tree and DRH code in general are truly piece of art. Almost every line of code is carefully commented. Despite the complexity of the project, you'll learn a lot of practical concepts including expression tree generation, bytecode execution, how to test your code and so forth.

Not to mention humor -- there's a reference in SQLite to Golding's Lord of the Flies -- and I'm guessing more.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

#36

Post by macintux »

seisvelas wrote: post #12
tiffanyh wrote: post #6

For me, the answer is - The code that never existed. Not to sound cheeky but eliminating code, is a beautiful thing. Less code is easier to maintain, understand, and faster to run. So the less code you can achieve, the better overall the software will be.

Deleting code is a beautiful feeling. Python's new walrus operator has gotten a lot of hate recently, but a few days ago I was writing a script and realized I could get rid of a few lines (AND have my meaning be clearer) using the walrus operator. So satisfying.

As a fan of Erlang’s pattern matching, the walrus operator feels like an obvious win.

I do, however, resent Python 3 for removing pattern matching on tuples in function heads.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

#37

Post by th0ma5 »

vatys wrote: post #23

For me it's a BASIC one-liner which generates mazes 10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10 I found this specific one via slashdot[1], but something similar, which I've never managed to find/replicate, was used to generate mazes on the Atari 800 XL at my school when I was a kid. [1] https://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/12/01/1847244/how-d...

In action: https://youtube.com/watch?v=m9joBLOZVEo

Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

#38

Post by mattnewport »

jtms wrote: post #28

Curious why the comment about STL algorithms written by Alexander Stepanov was downvoted so hard it died? I’m not a C++ dev... is he hated or is the implementation that bad?

I was wondering too. His series of videos on YouTube from A9 on algorithms is excellent and has some very beautiful code but you have to work through the series to fully appreciate it.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

#39

Post by Waterluvian »

vatys wrote: post #23

For me it's a BASIC one-liner which generates mazes 10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10 I found this specific one via slashdot[1], but something similar, which I've never managed to find/replicate, was used to generate mazes on the Atari 800 XL at my school when I was a kid. [1] https://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/12/01/1847244/how-d...

Oh wow this is a cool loop closure. I wrote a CHIP 8 emulator to learn stuff and my main test rom was this program. I walked through the bytecode very slowly as I learned and debugged and repeatedly wondered how the heck the program was so tiny.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?

#40

Post by saagarjha »

jtms wrote: post #28

Curious why the comment about STL algorithms written by Alexander Stepanov was downvoted so hard it died? I’m not a C++ dev... is he hated or is the implementation that bad?

It's from a user which seems to have had their comments killed immediately. I vouched for it so it should be fine now.
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