Beautiful Code

I was having a conversation with someone a few weeks back about the beauty you can often find in well-written source code. We were exchanging examples, and I started to think about how I would explain what makes code beautiful to someone else, other than by example.

Unlike the visual arts, we don't really have a concise, descriptive vocabulary for describing the aesthetic qualities of computer source code. Whereas you have words like proportion, balance, and complementary which actually mean specific things when talking about a painting or sculpture or building, more often than not when you want to tell someone how to make a piece of code more beautiful, your best bet is "make it more like that."

That's why it's especially important in computer science education, as well as in practice at companies that develop software, to have a canon of beautiful source code to which you can refer.

Just as there is no one universal definition of beauty, and the perception of beauty varies significantly from population to population, there is no one canon of universally beautiful code. I've found that really good engineers keep their own catalog of beautiful code that they've encountered over their careers. For those looking for potential sources of inspiration, here are a few suggestions:

• Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls is a classic, full of good code and elegant solutions to digestible problems.
• Dave Hanson's C Interfaces and Implementations is full of beautiful code. Check out the chapter on arenas, a still very relevant way to think about memory management for certain types of programs.
• Greg Wilson and Andy Orem actually wrote a book called Beautiful Code a few years back. It has contributions from some of the best coders in the history of our discipline, with examples of their code.

This is a woefully incomplete list. I'd love to hear from others about their sources of coding inspiration, and where they find beauty in the practice of their craft.