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?
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.
I refactored it (on Director of Engineering's request) into discrete classes and functions that read well and were easily tested. Tested all our cases and even found existing bugs that were resolved in the move. This wasn't an incredible amount of code to begin with either. The initial file was probably 400-500 lines of code. This was not the feat of an incredible dev, it was just taking a minute to think and build it out. Most of the team could've also done the same in a day.
And then the CEO didn't like the idea of merging it, despite it being fully unit and integration test, along with a staging and canary testing plan.
I've heard they _still_ don't like to touch that file. The company isn't doing well. I don't think those two are correlated, but I do think the general mindset of the leadership does.
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.
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.
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
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800777
Best I’ve seen is probably the Golang arm64 NEON asm implementation of maphash using AES before the 1.24 update.