Ask HN: What's the best source code you've read?

I used to work for a large newspaper. Engineering wasn’t the focus of the business, it was only a means to an end, it was just something they needed to have a competitive website. As a result, the churn rate was very high. But more interesting there was also a very high return rate. Engineers would come and go and return and leave again all the time.

As a result, the code base was a path work of various engineers with various skill level, different directions by different heads of engineering, repurposed old projects, legacy code and last minute additions by urgent request from the editors, among others.

The part I was most familiar with was what I can only describe as a sort of next.js but unlike it, it wasn’t planned or designed but rather it sort of grew organically over the years.

The fascinating thing to me was precisely this phenomenon. Some projects have a clear design and purpose and are built so from the start. Sort of like a building or a mechanical clock.

Others just evolve over time, they change, mutate, evolve, incorporate other bits. More like a biological organism or perhaps nature taking back a derelict settlement.

At first as you can imagine it was difficult to wrap my head around it. But in time, I started to see the beauty in it. It had historical bits. There was code written in 2010 that ran in 2020. Others you could tell little habits of the writer. Not everything gets stamped out by the linter. There was this guy who wrote “class ClassName extends React[“Component”]” - I have no idea why but I would run into code written by him and immediately recognise, ah yes, that’s that guy.

It’s certainly not an example of a good code base, but to me was interesting being able to see the code as a living organism with a history and fingerprints of it’s creators rather than a well designed machine.

Node, by comparison, is a ghetto.