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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?

#201

Post by chii »

enriquto wrote: post #187
chii wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's the antithesis of maintainable code. But given that one is unlikely to want to change from calculating the inverse square root to inverse cube root or any other variation....

I disagree strongly. This code is very maintainable: it does not have dependencies, it is trivial to test, it is wickedly short, and with the appropriate comment there is no confusion regarding its purpose. Also, its field of applicability is clear from the context: replace this code with a call to fsqrt if you happen to have a fast hardware implementation of it. It is the most easily maintainable code, ever!

the one maintainability metric, and i think is the most important one, is whether it's easy to modify (to make it do something slightly different).

You'd be hard pressed to write an inverse square cube without basically rewriting the whole function. There's nothing that can be reused. The only saving grace is that it is side-effect free, so replacement is trivial, unlike a lot of other code that's not maintainable.

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

#202

Post by ansis- »

Jarqwiz wrote: post #156

For me it's a function that calculates factorial using iterators in Rust: fn factorial(i: u64) -> u64 { (1..=i).product() } In almost every other language this code would look messy or use some terrible recursion. For example in C it would look something like this: long factorial(int n) { int c; long result = 1; for (c = 1; c Or with recursion: long factorial(int n) { if (n == 0) return 1; else return(n * factorial(n…

C can be quite elegant:

  long factorial(int n) {
          return n == 0 ? 1 : n * factorial(n - 1);
  }

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

#204

Post by quickthrower2 »

chii wrote: post #201
enriquto wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree strongly. This code is very maintainable: it does not have dependencies, it is trivial to test, it is wickedly short, and with the appropriate comment there is no confusion regarding its purpose. Also, its field of applicability is clear from the context: replace this code with a call to fsqrt if you happen to have a fast hardware implementation of it. It is the most easily maintainable code, ever!

the one maintainability metric, and i think is the most important one, is whether it's easy to modify (to make it do something slightly different). You'd be hard pressed to write an inverse square cube without basically rewriting the whole function. There's nothing that can be reused. The only saving grace is that it is side-effect free, so replacement is trivial, unlike a lot of other code that's not maintainable.

The question is how likely are you to need it to do something different, and what are the different things it might need to do? This will depend on the domain, but making things too flexible hampers maintainability too.

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

#205

Post by quickthrower2 »

labria wrote: post #117

(define eval-expr (lambda (expr env) (pmatch expr [`,x (guard (symbol? x)) (env x)] [`(lambda (,x) ,body) (lambda (arg) (eval-expr body (lambda (y) (if (eq? x y) arg (env y)))))] [`(,rator ,rand) ((eval-expr rator env) (eval-expr rand env))]))) There's an amazing talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyfBQmvr2Hc

Y Combinator?

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

#206

Post by Shinchy »

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...

I love it!

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

#207

Post by zaarn »

codecritic wrote: post #89
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...

No, it does not generate a maze. It generates a random sequence of \s and /s, that can trigger a maze being generated in a typical user's mind. This is the art of illusion.

A maze does not have to be solvable.
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