Beautiful Code: Part 15 (or so it seems)

At the risk of flogging the "beautiful code" horse more than necessary, there's good reason to follow up on my previous note about beautiful code the concept and Beautiful Code the book.

So the news is that Beautiful Code the book won the Jolt Award in the General Book category. Congratulations to its editors Greg Wilson and Andy Oram, and to all of its contributors--many of whom you are familiar with in the pages of Dr. Dobb's Journal.

Secondly, recall that I asked you to share your definitions of "beautiful code." So far, more than 100 of you have shared, and I'd like to thank you all. If I recall correctly, Crilly Butler, Jr. was the first person to respond with this definition/description: "Fully abstracted and internally documented. Everything named descriptively with no arcane abbreviations and truncations." Jack Purdum quickly followed with "Beautiful code...is efficient working code that I can give to another programmer and, within seconds, that programmer can read and understand what the code does. This definition embraces all programming elements: style, coding conventions, and commenting. It also subsumes productive coding since it can be easily maintained by someone else." And I like Jack Chislett's definition in which he quoted/paraphrased Albert Einstein who said: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." Like Jack said, "code should be like that."

In the meantime, I'll start sorting through and following up on the rest of your thoughts. Thanks again.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 11:53 AM  Permalink