Ask HN: The most fun and beautiful code you know of?

Re:Ask HN: The most fun and beautiful code you know of? by Xichekolas on Saturday May 23, 2009 @01:47AM (#623186)

Funny seeing this, because I was at my local Borders earlier and decided to give that Beautiful Code book a shot. I've seen it on the shelf for quite a while, but those books don't tend to turn my crank, so to speak, so I had never before really considered it.

I only read the first and the third essay, but I must say, wow!

The third essay, for instance, takes a simple 12 line implementation of quicksort in C (which is already quite beautiful), and through a series of well explained transformations, arrives at a four line proof (as in, it's C code that is equivalent to the recurrence relation, and eventually the summation, we all solved in our CS classes) of the average case complexity (~1.4nlgn comparisons) of the quicksort he started with.

That is what I would consider "nightstand" code, or at least a nightstand essay about code. It was actually entertaining, to the point that you don't realize you are solving a recurrence relation in C form until the end, when the parallel becomes obvious.

I only had a chance to skim the other topics, but I'm actually considering buying it, because it really was a blast to read.

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Re:Ask HN: The most fun and beautiful code you know of? by Xichekolas on Saturday May 23, 2009 @11:22AM (#623508)

Oh and to post some actual code...

Definitely not _the_ most beautiful code I've written, but I still enjoy this little function for some reason. It's just pretty to me.

  function addparams(query) {
      return query.replace(/(&?)([^&=]+)=([^&]*)/g, function(m, amper, key, id) {
          var val = document.getElementById(id).value;
          return val.length > 0 ? amper + key + "=" + escape(val) : '';
      });
  }

All it does is take a query string template of sorts, grab the values to plug in, and then return an actual query string. For instance, if you had this on your page somewhere:

  <input type="text" id="first" value="defaultfirst"/>
  <input type="text" id="last" value="defaultlast"/>

Then we used it when doing some kind of ajax update. Assuming jQuery, (although that wasn't the case) something like this:

  $.ajax({
    url: "/path/to/page",
    data: addparams("fn=first&ln=last")
  });

Which would make an xhr GET request to:

  /path/to/page?fn=defaultfirst&ln=defaultlast

Nothing remotely complicated or amazing like the regex that finds prime numbers or the 12 line quicksort, but I just think the function is aesthetically pleasing.

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Re:Ask HN: The most fun and beautiful code you know of? by RiderOfGiraffes on Saturday May 23, 2009 @04:50AM (#623277)

I think it's been posted before, but it's relevant. You can see Jon Bentley give a talk on that here:

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/three-beautiful-quicksorts/

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