Without a doubt some of the oldest programs that can be found in the Unix ecosystem, e.g. grep, rsync, wc, tr and so many more. If you have ever done some shell scripting, you know how valuable and well conceived this programs are. So I think that they being used so often by such an enormous and heterogeneous user base so many years after they were originally conceived, says a lot about how influential they are.

The nice thing about them is that they are open source so you can have a look at how they have been implemented and probably step up your C and systems programming game a lot.

Bill Atkinson may have contributed a few masterworks. I was always take by this small store of the development of the Apple Macintosh.

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...

Maybe the Fast inverse square root?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Histo...

More like a neat trick than a masterwork.

The metaphor doesn't translate because programming is not an art.

The closest equivalent, I would say, would be learning the simple elegance of algorithms and data structures like quicksort or the linked list.

Do you think it's too easy, like basic things?

If you wanted to go to the other extreme I'd say something like dwarf fortress or the Linux project, the cathedrals of software engineering.

Todo list apps on React, apparently…