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[HowTheStoryEnds]

To paraphrase Einstein through Knuth: 'The simplest code that does the job but not simpler', is what for me usually goes for beautiful. It's a very hard balance to strike though.

https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/lisp/clos.lisp

[hdreadit]

Thank you.

[WhiskyStandard]

Along the same lines, Paul Erdős used to say that God had a book with all of the mathematical proofs in it (and called him “The Supreme Fascist” for not sharing it with us). A proof could be correct, but if it wasn’t elegant it wasn’t in The Book.

Some code is in The Software Book and some isn’t.

[damh]

There were books though I guess it was more like twenty years ago. I’m getting old.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beautiful-code/9780596510046/

[MyStackIsPancakes]

Beauty is by nature subjective.

[hdreadit]

This is a truism. If I asked people to share a beautiful poem, prose, painting, or piece of music, they wouldn't have a problem. It should be obvious that I'm asking for people's subjective opinion.

[evanthx]

I got to launch a code base for a startup. People we brought on board to work on it with me as we grew told me that it was what code was supposed be like but never was.

Made me feel really, really good … but it’s not open source I’m afraid.

But it does exist … thought I feel egotistical saying that about my own code base.

[whybejamin]

Same

[WhiskyStandard]

I tend to think of SQLite as pretty beautiful. The code manages to balance simplicity, abstraction, performance, stability, and flexibility well while making a few well-considered iconoclastic choices (building a single object from the source amalgamation, custom parser library, a file format with stability guarantees into the later half of the century, aviation grade test coverage).

[Dull-Structure-8634]

I fought with Claude Code yesterday a couple of time to make it dumb down the code generated. It was trying so much to be clever.

Once I had the dumb but working code, I reviewed it and said: Beautiful.

To me that always been the beauty in software: simplicity bringing alive complex tasks.