Ask HN: Who are some programmers (in)famous for their quirky coding style?

Posted by xelxebar on Friday June 07, 2019 @08:05PM
from the ask-hn dept.

I recently stumbled across a some code written in extremely dense C, using a good bit of cpp to define common patterns down to single-character tokens. Apparently, the programmer is famous for this sort of style, but unfortunately I completely forgot his name.

Anyway, this got me intrigued in code that is written in principled, albeit, non-conventional styles.

I'm sure HN has stumbled across some absolute gems in its vast experience, so please share!

( 4 comments | 2 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: Who are some programmers (in)famous for their qui... by bobbybidon on Friday June 07, 2019 @08:14PM (#20129719)

Quirky or bad? Elon Musk: https://www.quora.com/Did-Elon-Musk-write-any-code-at-X-or-Z... (not a very good source but I remember it was mentioned in Elon's bio by Ashlee Vance that his code was functional but had to be fully rewritten)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Who are some programmers (in)famous for their qui... by greenyoda on Friday June 07, 2019 @11:40PM (#20130494)

I saw that kind of macro-based syntax a long time ago in some ancient Unix code (Version 7 from Bell Labs) - I think it may have been in Bourne's shell ("sh"). It had macros like:

    #define BEGIN {
    #define END }
    ...

The author really seemed to prefer Pascal-like syntax to C.

A quirky programming style that was fairly popular at Microsoft at some point was "Hungarian Notation", invented by Charles Simonyi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Who are some programmers (in)famous for their qui... by pietroglyph on Saturday June 08, 2019 @03:41PM (#20134630)

Are you thinking of Arthur Whitney?

His work was discussed on HN a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19481505

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Who are some programmers (in)famous for their qui... by xelxebar on Sunday June 09, 2019 @08:26AM (#20138753)

Oh my goodness. Yes. Thank you! This is the exact post I had in mind.

[ Parent | on HN ]