Ask HN: What are some of the most elegant codebases in your favorite language?

I'll agree with everything here except the clean code. Clean code is about optimizing human perception and there can't be a standard for that because humans think in a wide variety of ways and it's further impacted by the level of understanding the human already has on the subject matter the code is dealing with. One person's "clean code" can be another person's nightmare.

I'll back this up with the example of Magento 1. It's a PHP e-commerce platform that has (at first glance) some of the cleanest code you'll ever see in PHP. It looked like the entire development team had come from a Java background. Every component was neatly divided into a PHP object with documented private and public methods. There was a clean MVC separation, with lots of shared behavior abstracted into "Helpers", and a Theme system handling the rendering of the front-end. I have no doubt that the authors of Magento prided themselves on how clean their code was. For them, having spent full-time careers structuring all the many features of their platform into these files, it probably did feel like a clean organization. And when I initially reviewed the code to evaluate using Magento, I also thought it was clean and was part of my choice to use it.

The problem was that when you take something as complex as a full-featured e-commerce system and modularize it so thoroughly, you end up with a literal 7000 classes, and it becomes impossible to figure out the sequence of execution of a single page request through that massive tangle. Is it "clean code" if I have to add debugging print statements to 57 source files to figure out the path of execution that renders a single page?

If I had to choose a circle of hell where I would edit Cyrus IMAP (the worst C code ever) for the rest of eternity, or edit Magento for the rest of eternity, I think I would actually choose Cyrus.

I went Pascal, C, Perl, Python, Go

And I like Typescript to some point.

I do not think they languages are mutually exclusive (on the like scale). But I am just an amateur hobbyist dev.

RT-11 on the PDP-11 (all in PDP-11 assembler). Back in the early 80's you could rebuild it in several different ways, depending on whether you wanted it "single job" (as it was back then) or not.

As an example, here's the PDP-11 assembler to convert a binary number to decimal ASCII (no idea who wrote it, but they certainly made every word count):-

  CNV10:  MOV     R0,-(SP)     ;Subroutine to convert Binary # in R0
  1$:     CLR     R0           ;to Decimal ASCII by repetitive
          INC     R0           ;subtraction. The remainder for each
  2$:     SUB     #10.,@SP     ;radix is made into ASCII and pushed
          BGE     1$           ;on the stack, then the routine calls
          ADD     #72,@SP      ;itself. The code at 2$ pops the ASCII
          DEC     R0           ;digits off the stack and into the out-
          BEQ     2$           ;put buffer, eventually returning to
          CALL    CNV10        ;the calling program. This is a VERY
          MOVB    (SP)+,(R1)+  ;useful routine, is short and is
          RETURN               ;memory efficient.

Courtesy bitsavers.org (http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/rt11/v5.6_Aug91/AA-PD...)

I'd nominate Java itself.

In the decades Java sources have been available, any of the kazillion junior programmers could debug-step into java.* and see exactly what's happening -- progressive disclosure at its finest for building expertise.

Most other languages have a hard boundary, so the roots of language are a matter of conceptual documentation and experience. Java also offers that fly-over knowledge, but when problems arise, programmers love knowing exactly and seeing directly.

Personally, in a pinch I prefer the actual to the elegant.

Yes. I have been burned by this in C#, it’s very frustrating.