What is the most beautiful / highest quality code you've seen (or written)?
literal shower-thought i had tonight as i was thinking about how at work we all don't like dealing with our helm charts because the syntax and structure ends up looking so ugly and it just feels wrong (not to mention the multiple different approaches of handling kubernetes resources in multiple different pipelines.
i try to see beyond any initial repulsion to weird looking code because i know that it may be super functional. but it got me thinking: what makes code beautiful? what makes code "high quality"? (other than that it results in a working, performant, and robust software program obviously).
so i'm curious -- can you show me the best code you've encountered? it can be a small snippet or it can be a "slice of a library" or an architecture etc. have you written anything yourself that you are super proud of?
The best system I ever worked with looked incredibly simple. Small, clear functions. Lots of "set a few variables, run some if statements." Incredibly unassuming, humble code. But it handled 10s of millions of transactions per day elegantly and correctly. Every weird edge case or subtle concurrency bug or whatever else you could think of had been squeezed out of the system. Everything fit together like LEGO blocks, seamlessly coming together into a comprehensible, functional, performant system. I loved it. After years of accepting mediocre code as the cost of doing business, seeing this thing in a corporate environment inspired me to fall in love with software again and commit to always doing my best to write high quality code.
EDIT: I think what made that code so good is that there was absolutely nothing unnecessary in the whole system. Every variable, every function, every class was absolutely necessary to deliver the required functionality or to ensure some technical constraint was respected. Everything in that system belonged, and nothing didn't.
Was it written by one person?
The majority of it, yes.
To me, Nginx. I remember seeing this file structure and saying: "ohh, that's how it should be done"
---A few years later I stumbled upon this refactoring video by Uncle Bob and that was my second aha! moment.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150905163826/https://www.youtu...
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Many people here recommend Redis as an inspiring example.
It is not open source, but I am still proud of a message delivery system I designed and built alone two years ago. It consists of six independent components and guarantees at least one successful delivery as long as the database remains available. It supports AWS SES, Twilio SMS and MMS, Webhook, Discord messages, and can easily add new providers through an adapter pattern.
Messages are queued through an API, captured by Debezium, produced to Kafka, delivered by workers, logged, and updated through DSNs received via webhook. Failures go to a DLQ where they are retried until the limit is reached.
Each stage runs independently, so any failure only causes minor delay without risking unintended drops. With Prometheus metrics in place, this system has processed more than two hundred thousand messages per day in production for two years without a single reported loss.
Deleted code. Removal of requirements. It's wonderful, letting it go.
Code that doesn't exist is code you don't have to maintain. I enjoy that as well.
One recent HN post I loved recently was on Arthur Whitney's insanely terse C code[0]. I personally find it beautiful, and many others did, but many did not. So it goes.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800777
Pytudes by Peter Norvig: https://github.com/norvig/pytudes
High quality ("beautiful") code is as simple AND legible as possible, while remaining logically correct. All must be present.
It is a balance. And legibility is a fuzzy attribute that depends on the intellectual capacity of the collective observer.
But, beauty is subjective.. some people think maximally terse code is beautiful so... shrug
I found the netsurf browser to have a pretty and modular C codebase: https://www.netsurf-browser.org/downloads/source/
My personal best is probably the metaclass tree formation in HumbleDB.
Best I’ve seen is probably the Golang arm64 NEON asm implementation of maphash using AES before the 1.24 update.
Factor code can be extremely beautiful: y1 y2 [ - sq ] 2map sum n / sqrt It can also be extremely messy.