Any "Pretty" Code Out There?

andhow writes "Practically any time I hear a large software system discussed I hear "X is a #%@!in mess," or "Y is unmanageable and really should be rewritten." Some of this I know is just fresh programmers seeing their first big hunk o' code and having the natural reaction. In other cases I've heard it from main developers, so I'll take their word for it. Over time, it paints a bleak picture, and I'd be really like to know of a counterexample. Getting to know a piece of software well enough to ascertain its quality takes a long time, so I submit to the experience of the readership: what projects have you worked on which you felt had admirable code, both high-level architecture and in-the-trenches implementation? In particular I am interested in large user applications using modern C++ libraries and techniques like exception handling and RAII."

Comments

Re:New Law?

[Anonymous Coward]

The cruftiness of source code is directly proportional to the amount of time spent working on it times the number of people working on it.

I think you meant the cruftiness of source code is direcly proportional to the number of people working on it DIVIDED BY the amount of time spent working on it.

This explains why commercial source code produced by large teams of programmers under tight arbitrary deadlines tends to be sloppy. Source code produced by passionate hobbyists under the "we'll release it when it's done" deadline perspective tends to be cleaner.

BOOST::Python, but you haven't seen the source???

[r00t]

At least you admit to being uninformed.

I haven't looked either, but I happen to know that BOOT::Python often does NOT work. It has thread-related problems.

At for the rest of BOOST, I've looked at a good chunk. BOOST makes decent programmers cry. The other follow-up post by the Anonymous Coward Xbox developer has it all correct.

I'll add:

BOOST is full of butt-ugly hacks. Check out the, uh, template things, named _0 through _9 being used as stand-in dummy arguments. Eeeeeew!!!

BOOST looks easy to dumb-ass programmers, but these programmers leave bugs that are difficult for expert programmers to find.

BOOST makes compilers run very very slow, and often breaks the optimizer anyway.

Bourne Shell

[Repton]

The Bourne Shell must get some kind of mention here. What do you do if you prefer ALGOL to C? Why, #define your own syntax, and thus turn boring old C code into a thing of beauty.

Donald Knuth once apparently said

[tadghin]

that he thought Bill Atkinson's MacPaint was the most beautiful program ever written. Hearing this, Andy Hertzfeld made it a priority to recover the source code from an old Macintosh diskette. He contacted me because he was a bit worried about Apple's reaction if he just released it on the net (since it was Apple property), and I advised him to get the Computer History Museum involved if he didn't want to take the risk. I believe that he donated the code, but I'm not sure what the Museum did to have it made available.

The MacPaint code was donated...

[Sits]

Andy mentions this topic towards the end of an interview with Bob Cringely on Nerd TV. At the bottom of this archive of NerdTV episodes is a link to episode number 1 in a variety of formats. Here's the transcript of the Nerd TV interview where Andy says

So I was thinking of putting it on the site, Apple would send me a cease-and-desist, I'd take it down, but it would be out there then. But I was just a little too chicken. Finally Tim O'Reilly came up with the brilliant solution of donating it to the Computer History Museum as a historic artifact. Perhaps they could get permission from Apple. So that's what we did. It took a few months but [i]n August Apple approved the donation of the MacPaint source code to the Computer History Museum. This was their first major software artifact in their collection so they made a big deal of it, made a video of us, and eventually the MacPaint source code will be available from their web site to anyone in the world.

It's just occurred to me you are Tim O'Reilly. Wow, there are still some important folks that still post on /. ! Your company gave me some free books and a T-shirt when I was in my second year of University, thanks! Many of the well known people who used to post here have abandoned it in recent years so the feel of the place has changed. The only big name I still see around here is Jeremy Alison from Samba...