Comments on: Code CAN Be Beautiful

By: -= Linkage 2007.02.25 =-

-= Linkage 2007.02.25 =- — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:38:32 +0000

[...] Beautiful Code? Yes!
This drives me nuts, it really does. Of course the representation can be beautiful, and it can also be ugly. And the beauty of the representation can have an amplifying effect on the subject of the representation. Form and content are related. [...]

By: Max

Max — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:02:27 +0000

This blog is simply smashing. In my humble opinion of course. As this post is rather debatable I don’t think all your blog visitors are going to agree with it.

By: vFiles

vFiles — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:32:36 +0000

-regards to all

,what is important is that your code flows smoothly and it is according to your algorithm and most especially you can predict wether you can maximize its capability and upgrade its limitation. Thats how beautiful your work is, your programme!

,other than that, can someone analyze the program that i developed it is a sorting algorithm. I made this program not to surpass the quicksort but since im in the process i used to attempt surpassing the fastest quicksort. Now i already finished it and based from the demonstrations and observation it is many times faster than the quicksort. I still want somebody who really knows how to evaluate so that i am confident that my algorithm was beautiful.

, thanks

By: -jn-

-jn- — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:33:29 +0000

Ah, how we programmers LOVE to refuse to separate our concerns!

All the quibbling about programming language preferences and “I can write that function in fewer characters” puts me in mind of the book Strictly Speaking by Edwin Newman. Written in the immediately-post-Watergate era, the book is a wonderful extended lament on the difference between elegant ideas expressed in homely fashion (with examples from Yogi Berra, Casey Stengel, etc. IIRC) vs empty ideas expressed in flowery language (most of the politicians and advertisers of the day).

I’d also recommend The Crystal Goblet by Beatrice Warde for the same principles applied to typography. (See http://gmunch.home.pipeline.com/typo-L/misc/clar.htm for discussion.)

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 23:15:15 +0000

Not only can code be beautiful, but programming itself should be counted among the ‘fine arts’. Or so argued Pierre Lévy in his 1992 book De la programmation considérée comme un des beaux arts (On computer programming as a fine art):
http://www.amazon.fr/dp/2707121541/

By: Michael Trick’s Operations Research Blog » P.G. Wodehouse approach to Modeling?

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 18:44:15 +0000

[...] Unfortunately, not, but close. Refactoring in this context is “any change to a computer program’s code that improves its readability or simplifies its structure without changing its results”, according to wikipedia. So when a computer program is built on over the years, at some point there is a wish to rewrite or otherwise consolidate the code so it is back looking new, ideally with the effects of all the changes intact. Of course, this is relevant to OR also. We often put together models that have been added on to, changed, and modified to within an inch of their lives. And at some point we would like to have the model “we should have written” in the first place. So there is a temptation to toss everything out and start again. In fact, I often recommend doing so in my classes. But that isn’t very good practice, according to contemporary work in refactorization: Now, the first mistake to avoid here is the compulsion to throw it away and rewrite from scratch. So often when confronted with a vast seething moiling spiritless mass of code a developer throws his hands into the air and declares it a lost cause. How seductive is the thought that 31,000 lines of code could be thrown away and replaced with ~15,000 lines of clean, well-designed, beautiful code? [...]

By: anonymous

anonymous — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 14:10:05 +0000

> I am partial to c++ in this case,
> See the inplace quicksort in c++ compared to haskell’s not-inplace one.
> taken from: http://erikhaugen.blogspot.com/

Nice all right. I’m not too sure about the entirely in-place bit though. When I looked up stable_partition to see what it did, it seems that most implementation partition through allocating a temporary buffer…

By: rahul

rahul — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 11:46:15 +0000

I am partial to c++ in this case,
See the inplace quicksort in c++ compared to haskell’s not-inplace one.
taken from: http://erikhaugen.blogspot.com/


template

void quicksort(Iter begin, Iter end) {

    if(begin == end) return;

    Iter pivot = stable_partition(begin, end, _1 < *begin);

    quicksort(begin, pivot);

    quicksort(pivot + 1, end);

}

By: Programming expert

Programming expert — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:28:17 +0000

1) Quicksort (and mergsort) have nothing to do with being “in-place” or not. There are in-place versions of both (though in place merge sort is usually called heap sort) and…. functional-friendly versions of both.

2) Understanding is very much bound with beuty. When I used to read Smalltalk code I thought it was awful because I didn’t understand it (the same problem Georgi has above). After I learned the syntax and saw the elegance of what it was doing it quickly became the most beutiful language I have ever seen. Lisp is high on that list as well, based on it’s simplicity and elegance.

Things we don’t understand we tend to see as *ugly*. Especially when the thing in question is from a domain we expect to understand.

You point about Italian opera misses the mark because for many who enjoy opera they content is the sounds and visuals. We understand very well what sites and sounds are pleasing to us (though we probably wont know why). Probably a similar percentage of people watch opera for the plot as do for a porno.

By: Daily Links - February 24, 2008 | Alvin Ashcraft's Daily Geek Bits

Daily Links - February 24, 2008 | Alvin Ashcraft's Daily Geek Bits — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 13:01:12 +0000

[...] Code CAN Be Beautiful (Russ Gray) [...]