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Programming IT Technology

Any "Pretty" Code Out There? 658

andhow writes "Practically any time I hear a large software system discussed I hear "X is a #%@!in mess," or "Y is unmanageable and really should be rewritten." Some of this I know is just fresh programmers seeing their first big hunk o' code and having the natural reaction. In other cases I've heard it from main developers, so I'll take their word for it. Over time, it paints a bleak picture, and I'd be really like to know of a counterexample. Getting to know a piece of software well enough to ascertain its quality takes a long time, so I submit to the experience of the readership: what projects have you worked on which you felt had admirable code, both high-level architecture and in-the-trenches implementation? In particular I am interested in large user applications using modern C++ libraries and techniques like exception handling and RAII."
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Any "Pretty" Code Out There?

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  • Firefox (Score:4, Funny)

    by zBoD ( 86938 ) <BoD@JRAF.org> on Saturday July 14, 2007 @07:32PM (#19862759) Homepage Journal
    Just kidding :))
    • Re:Firefox (Score:4, Interesting)

      by fimbulvetr ( 598306 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @07:46PM (#19862885)
      IMHO, postfix takes the cake for the most elegant and readable code I've ever looked at. At one point I found an screenshot of qmail vs. postfix code in similar areas for handling some condition. The qmail code was hardcoded, had nasty loops and was just plain unbearable. The postfix version, however, was exceedingly elegant and I knew right away what the code was doing.

      I only wish firefox was 10% as elegant and cruft free as postfix.
      • Re:Firefox (Score:5, Funny)

        by Rick Zeman ( 15628 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @08:02PM (#19863003)
        At one point I found an screenshot of qmail vs. postfix code in similar areas for handling some condition. The qmail code was hardcoded, had nasty loops and was just plain unbearable. The postfix version, however, was exceedingly elegant and I knew right away what the code was doing.

        And don't forget that postfix is well-commented, and with superb documentation. Re the comments about qmail, I've kept lying around in my mailbox Linus' thoughts about qmail. Couple of interesting points in there.

        On Sun, 6 Jun 2004, Kalin KOZHUHAROV wrote:

        Well, not exactly sure about my reply, but let me try.

        The other day I was debugging some config problems with my qmail instalation and I ended up doing:
        # strace -p 4563 -f -F
        [...] (deleted to bypass lameness filter)
        qmail is a piece of crap. The source code is completely unreadable, and it
        seems to think that "getpid()" is a good source of random data. Don't ask
        me why.

        It literally does things like

                random = now() + (getpid() (two less than signs deleted) 16);
        and since there isn't a single comment in the whole source tree, it's
        pointless to wonder why. (In case you wonder, "now()" just does a
        "time(NULL)" call - whee.).

        I don't understand why people bother with it. It's not like Dan Bernstein
        is so charming that it makes up for the deficiencies of his programs.

        But no, even despite the strange usage, this isn't a performance issue.
        qmail will call "getpid()" a few tens of times per connection because of
        the wonderful quality of randomness it provides, or something.

        This is another gem you find when grepping for "getpid()" in qmail, and
        apparently the source of most of them:

                if (now() - when (less than sign deleted) ((60 + (getpid() & 31)) (two less than signs deleted) 6))

        Don't you love it how timeouts etc seem to be based on random values that
        are calculated off the lower 5 bits of the process ID? And don't you find
        the above (totally uncommented) line just a thing of beauty and clarity?

        Yeah.

        Anyway, you did find something that used more than a handful of getpid()
        calls, but no, it doesn't qualify as performance-critical, and even
        despite it's peyote-induced (or hey, some people are just crazy on their
        own) getpid() usage, it's not a reason to have a buggy glibc.

                        Linus

        • "And don't forget that postfix is well-commented,"

          In all fairness, nobody has ever cashed in on Bernstein's security guarentee. There have been some oopsies with postfix.

          I think Bernstein's code is as nice as it gets. Course, Dan is polite to me too; so maybe I live in an alternative universe.

  • by youthoftoday ( 975074 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @07:32PM (#19862763) Homepage Journal
    I can almost hear the FOSS trolls approach...
  • sure (Score:5, Funny)

    by buswolley ( 591500 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @07:32PM (#19862767) Journal
    Hello World!!!
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by dunezone ( 899268 )
      Hello World - Most written, rewritten, tested, and debugged code known to man.
    • Hello World (Score:5, Funny)

      by MillionthMonkey ( 240664 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @07:45PM (#19862863)
      public interface MessageStrategy {
              public void sendMessage();
      }

      public abstract class AbstractStrategyFactory {
              public abstract MessageStrategy createStrategy(MessageBody mb);
      }

      public class MessageBody {
              Object payload;
              public Object getPayload() { return payload; }
              public void configure(Object obj) { payload = obj; }
              public void send(MessageStrategy ms) {
                      ms.sendMessage();
              }
      }

      public class DefaultFactory extends AbstractStrategyFactory {
              private DefaultFactory() {}
              static DefaultFactory instance;
              public static AbstractStrategyFactory getInstance() {
                      if (null==instance) instance = new DefaultFactory();
                      return instance;
              }
              public MessageStrategy createStrategy(final MessageBody mb) {
                      return new MessageStrategy() {
                              MessageBody body = mb;
                              public void sendMessage() {
                                      Object obj = body.getPayload();
                                      System.out.println(obj.toString());
                              }
                      };
              }
      }
      public class HelloWorld {
                  public static void main(String[] args) {
                              MessageBody mb = new MessageBody();
                              mb.configure("Hello World!");
                              AbstractStrategyFactory asf = DefaultFactory.getInstance();
                              MessageStrategy strategy = asf.createStrategy(mb);
                              mb.send(strategy);
                  }
      }
      • license (Score:5, Funny)

        by MillionthMonkey ( 240664 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @07:53PM (#19862939)
        Ooops, I almost forgot:
        /*
              Hello World
              Copyright 2002 MillionthMonkey

              Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
              you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
              You may obtain a copy of the License at

                      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 [apache.org]

              Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
              distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
              WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
              See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
              limitations under the License.
        */


        You're welcome, "World"!
      • You must work on Saturdays.
      • by smittyoneeach ( 243267 ) * on Saturday July 14, 2007 @08:03PM (#19863011) Homepage Journal
        This is such an exquisite example of design pattern overkill that I may require a private moment.
        • by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @08:12PM (#19863079) Journal
          This is such an exquisite example of design pattern overkill that I may require a private moment.

          It is the Gang-of-four Job_Security_Strategy pattern. Only the author can figure out their own code like this, and if you get paid per volume of code, you get wealthy.

               
        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by jc42 ( 318812 )
          What I'd do with this wonderful example is observe that it contains the literal string "Hello World!" which is its sole rigid output. Clearly we need a new feature: The program should be able to substitute a person's (or organization's) name for the "World" substring. If properly done, this can at least double the amount of code.

          And when that's working, I'd suggest adding to its power and flexibility by making it possible to pass a login id or possibly an email address to the code, and have it look up th
      • by owlstead ( 636356 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @08:27PM (#19863207)
        /** Look, ma, no literals */
        public class Hello_World {
          public static void main(String ... args) {
            System.out.println(Hello_World.class.getSimpleName ());
          }
        }
      • by ookabooka ( 731013 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @09:27PM (#19863583)
        I spent about an hour on this, but I think it's funny. There was no way to get this past the lameness filter, so I used nopaste: http://rafb.net/p/D1f39951.html [rafb.net]
        Here is a little teaser though :)

        /**
        * This program is an elaborate joke about the strucuture of the Java
        * programming language. Technically you'll have to put all the
        * public interfaces and classes in their own file to get it to
        * compile. The actual code came from a slashdot post, comments were
        * later added by ookabooka.
        *
        * Originally Copyright 2002 MillionthMonkey.
        *
        * Ridiculously verbose and mostly useless comments (AKA good
        * commenting) added by ookabooka Copyright 2007.
        *
        * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
        * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
        * You may obtain a copy of the License at
        * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
        * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
        * software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS"
        * BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express
        * or implied. See the License for the specific language governing
        * permissions and limitations under the License.
        *
        * TODO:
        * Add some try/catches and a plethora of exceptions to further insult
        * Java.
        *
        * @author ookabooka
        * @version 2.41.54b_2-rc4
        * @see http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/14/20 11208
        */
        • by MillionthMonkey ( 240664 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @10:25PM (#19863879)
          Wow! That's impressive- I feel guilty now for carving so many minutes out of someone's life. Although if there were javadocs, I'd imagine that most of these disparaging comments would be within the HelloWorld class itself. The library code javadocs should always have lofty descriptions of themselves as if they're going to do brain surgery. Especially if they have empty implementations.

          If I wrote this code in 2007 I would have used "setPayload()" instead of "configure()" so that MessageBody would follow standard JavaBean conventions. That would let me easily wire one up in a Spring XML file. Maybe I could even insert AOP pointcuts somewhere. After all Hello World is the sort of application that practically screams for aspect oriented programming.
          • by ookabooka ( 731013 ) on Sunday July 15, 2007 @12:23AM (#19864485)
            Oh I throughly concur. We should set up a sourceforge project to get the community involved. There are a lot of aspects of the Java language that simply aren't being utilized. Check out this program I made a few months ago. It contains every Java keyword and is (nearly) impossible to follow the logic. Again due to the lameness of the lameness filter you'll have to go to http://rafb.net/p/g46jLN20.html [rafb.net] to see it in all its correctly-indented and colored glory, but here it is:

            public strictfp class Semantics extends Exception {
            private static volatile transient boolean l = false;
            private transient volatile static short j = 1;
            public volatile static transient Exception LogicClass = new Semantics();
            protected strictfp synchronized boolean WTF() throws Exception {
            again: do {
            l = !l;
            without: try {
            assert l ? true : LogicClass instanceof Semantics;
            continue;
            } catch (AssertionError e) {
            j++;
            LogicClass = new Exception();
            break again;
            } finally {
            switch (j % 2) {
            case 0:
            LogicClass = this;
            break again;
            default:
            break without;
            }
            }
            } while (--j > -10 ? false : true);
            throw this;
            }
            public static void main(String[] args) {
            Semantics s = new Semantics();
            try {
            System.out.println(s.WTF());
            } catch (Exception e) {
            System.out.print(s.l);
            }
            }
            }
            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              by tOaOMiB ( 847361 )
              You appear to be missing the simple if and else keywords! How do you miss an if-then statement?
  • New Law? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by VGPowerlord ( 621254 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @07:34PM (#19862779)
    The cruftiness of source code is directly proportional to the amount of time spent working on it times the number of people working on it.

    Has someone created such a law before?
    • Re:New Law? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 14, 2007 @08:07PM (#19863041)

      The cruftiness of source code is directly proportional to the amount of time spent working on it times the number of people working on it.

      I think you meant the cruftiness of source code is direcly proportional to the number of people working on it DIVIDED BY the amount of time spent working on it.

      This explains why commercial source code produced by large teams of programmers under tight arbitrary deadlines tends to be sloppy. Source code produced by passionate hobbyists under the "we'll release it when it's done" deadline perspective tends to be cleaner.

      • Re:New Law? (Score:5, Funny)

        by MarsDefenseMinister ( 738128 ) <dallapieta80@gmail.com> on Sunday July 15, 2007 @12:15AM (#19864443) Homepage Journal
        Cruftiness is the quality of having cruft. Cruft is the stuff that accumulates on code over time. Cruft has no odor, but it stinks. Cruft has no mass, but it weighs the code down. Cruft can't be seen, but it's ugly. Cruft cannot be young, it's always old. Cruft can't be deliberately added, it only appears when you're not looking. Cruft can't be explained to managers, except through awkward car analogies. They still won't get it because managers drive well-maintained elegant foreign cars like BMW's, which gather no cruft. Programmers understand, because their Fords and Chevys are practically built of cruft. Harley motorcycles should have cruft, but noise dissipates cruft. Cruft is mysterious.

        Cruft is never present on code which hasn't had enough work. Cruft only appears on code which has been worked too long, by too many people.
        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          I'm not 100% sure if cruft is a layman's term for Design Debt [awprofessional.com], or if Design Debt is just one type of cruft, but they're definitely related.
    • Re:New Law? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hobo sapiens ( 893427 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @10:40PM (#19863935) Journal
      No, submit it to foldoc.org. Also, it needs a corollary, which we'll call The Hobo Tangent: Enhancements are the root of all evil.

      Let's cue the scene...

      An application's code is written by a competent developer and is nice and clean and pretty. He releases the application, and its a success. He gets moved to the next high profile project, and then the application's code gets handed to the maintenance droid, you know, the new guy on the team who shops *exclusively* at Whole Foods, listens to Nickelback, and has stacks of People magazine in his cubicle. He took a semester of VB while at Party U pursuing a liberal arts degree, and so he is a programmer too, you know!

      Then, some PM or business manager who probably gets paid more than the original competent developer gets some bright ideas to make the application do things it never was intended to do. Let's say its a scheduling tool. Well, hey, they say, let's make it ALSO have an RSS feed! And a document repository! And a calculator! Can can you create some little project management software to work with it? A requirements document gets written, and a timeline is assigned.

      Everyone does their little piece, totally oblivious to the steaming pile of dung spaghetti they are turning the application's code into.

      Two years later, the original developer gets called to fix a problem that is simply beyond the dimwits holding the code. Poor guy doesn't even recognize his own application, and for him, it's like getting called to the morgue to ID the remains of a family member.

      And that, friends, is why people complain about bad code.

      Does this post make me sound cynical?
  • Amarok? (Score:3, Informative)

    by HappySmileMan ( 1088123 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @07:35PM (#19862793)
    I'm just a 15 year old with a basic knowledge of C++, I've cracked open some source packages to test how much I know from time to time and Amarok seemed fairly well done to me, though that is of course compared to other packages, I still hyad to do a little bit of searching around to understand it.

    Also the Last.fm player seems fairly well done, though for both these programs I didn't look through the full code or change anything, so maybe I just happened to stumble across the only 2-3 human-readable source files?
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by m50d ( 797211 )
      Amarok looks quite horrible by compairson with what its UI is built on. Though they have their gnarly parts, on the whole I am always impressed with the KDE libraries.r
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Is an artist ever happy with a painting?

    Trends and tastes change. If any coder is 100% happy with a project, they're in the wrong field.
    • by estevon07 ( 1068778 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @10:39PM (#19863919)

      I couldn't agree more. As I grow older, I've learned there really is a time when something is "good enough" to satisfy known requirements. I find that many applications are over engineered to some pie in the sky version of what's right and good - usually at the expense of simplicity and stability. I've often heard Java folks talk about re-factoring code and that's fine if no one is using your app, but in the event that folks and money are dependent on it, then re-factoring really just increases risk to all involved. The best possible outcome is that no one will notice the changes.

      It's definitely hard for more passionate developers to realize when time to value ratio has diminished to the point that your time is better spent on other projects. There's always one more thing to spruce up or optimize. Having been both a musician and developer, I like to think of my work as a reflection of me. Playing an instrument is similar in that there is always more to learn and practice on any given song, but sometimes you need to put it down and move along to other pieces. Even the best musicians play a variety of songs. I'm sure Eddie Van Halen could have perfected Eruption for the next 20 years after he recorded it, but he decided to spend his time on other works.

  • Maturity = Mess (Score:2, Insightful)

    by loony ( 37622 )
    Well, you'll always find people that say a code base is a mess when the better word would be different. I have a if statement with out { and } to close it... Is it needed in C++ for a single line? Nope - does it make it clearer and easier to read? Yes to me - and my friend Chris will tell you exactly the opposite...

    And on a related note - why rewrite? Can't people ever just go for cleaning something up? No cause then you are just doing mindless reformatting - while if you rewrite, you can claim you make it
    • by PianoComp81 ( 589011 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @08:02PM (#19863005)

      And on a related note - why rewrite? Can't people ever just go for cleaning something up? No cause then you are just doing mindless reformatting - while if you rewrite, you can claim you make it better, faster, whatever... So of course people will say its better to rewrite...
      On one project I'm currently working on, we DO just clean up the code. It's necessary because over time developers (myself included) haven't been following the coding standard for the project. To make the code more readable to future developers, we actually will try to clean up a file or pieces of a file when we touch it (comments, style, magic numbers, etc.). There are a lot files, and it hasn't always been a success (it's a continual battle), but it's better than rewriting it.

      Now, I *have* rewritten a lot of the code on the project, but not because it was "ugly". We had quite a lot of "prototype" code still in the project. Since it was prototype code, it didn't check for or handle error conditions very well (not to mention the endless bugs that have been found due to the prototype code). We've had to rewrite a lot of the code because it was easier to do that than fix the bugs in the code. This usually allows for easier debugging in the future AND gets rid of any of the bugs that were found (the bugs were usually caused by a bad or even completely wrong approach to the implementation).

      The difference is knowing when to clean up the code and when to rewrite it. If a developer just can't understand the code (because it needs cleanup or it's just very complicated), then it should be cleaned up and commented properly. Sure it's tedious, but everyone on the project loves you afterwards because they can suddenly understand the code! If there are bugs and it's obvious the implementation should have been done a different way (for speed, usability, modularity, whatever), then a rewrite might be in order.

      (and of course, as you mention, as time goes on the code starts looking "bad" or "old" again - time for hopefully another cleanup rather than a rewrite)
  • what? (Score:5, Funny)

    by joe 155 ( 937621 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @07:40PM (#19862821) Journal
    "Practically any time I hear a large software system discussed I hear "X is a #%@!in mess,"

    I get that with reading the next line you get the context, but was I the only one taken aback at this seemingly blatant flame of our beloved X?
  • BOOST (Score:4, Informative)

    by alyosha1 ( 581809 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @07:42PM (#19862839)
    The boost libraries tend to be a pleasure to work with. BOOST::Python especially continues to surprise me by how much it 'just works'. That said, I haven't had much need to look at the source code itself, but there seems to be a strong desire in the boost community to do things in as clean a way as possible.
    • Are you kidding? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 14, 2007 @08:20PM (#19863141)
      Boost is what I call "template madness". It uses template metaprogramming to the max, which (in the real world) means three things:

            (1) It's impossible to debug. You can't read the code. The debugger can't unravel the templated variables and stuff in any meaningful way for you. You can't even step through code, that's doing a supposedly simple operation like memory allocation!
            (2) Some compilers will choke on the code, or compile it wrong in subtle ways due to differing interpretations of some obscure section of the enormous C++ language spec.
            (3) The error messages from the compiler are useless. You have to run them through a filter to even figure out what they mean.
            (3) Bugs in the library are very difficult to fix. Template metaprograms are essentially programs written in a functional language, except one that has horrible syntax. This is not the stuff that normal C++ programs are made of.

      Your mileage may vary. My day job is working on a game engine for an upcoming Xbox360 game. Engines are hard enough without impractical crap like template metaprogramming in them. Give me straight-line C/C++ code any day.
      • by JNighthawk ( 769575 ) <NihirNighthawk&aol,com> on Saturday July 14, 2007 @08:40PM (#19863301)
        Mod up. AC knows what he's talking about.

        Even beyond that, Boost fills up the symbol table quick as hell, because of how templated it is. I worked on a project that used LuaBind, which requires Boost, extesnively. We eventually had to swap over from Visual Studio 2003 to 2005, because of Boost's templating filling up the symbol table. Visual Studio would just fail to compile. Lua's hard enough to debug as it is, but tossing Boost on top of it made it impossible.
        • I can well imagine that a linker would choke on Boost.

          For those with a Linux/BSD/Solaris system, try running the "nm" command against a solidly Boost-infected project. You're likely to find function names that are THOUSANDS of characters long.

          Think about what that means for program start-up, at least if you call into a library. The runtime linker has to chew through all that gunk. I've run a profiler on this kind of code, and sure enough the start-up time was dominated by looking up all those giant symbols.
    • by r00t ( 33219 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @08:46PM (#19863335) Journal
      At least you admit to being uninformed.

      I haven't looked either, but I happen to know that BOOT::Python often does NOT work. It has thread-related problems.

      At for the rest of BOOST, I've looked at a good chunk. BOOST makes decent programmers cry. The other follow-up post by the Anonymous Coward Xbox developer has it all correct.

      I'll add:

      BOOST is full of butt-ugly hacks. Check out the, uh, template things, named _0 through _9 being used as stand-in dummy arguments. Eeeeeew!!!

      BOOST looks easy to dumb-ass programmers, but these programmers leave bugs that are difficult for expert programmers to find.

      BOOST makes compilers run very very slow, and often breaks the optimizer anyway.
  • by PepeGSay ( 847429 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @07:43PM (#19862845)
    It is my experience that reading and understanding code is dramatically more difficult than writing code. It gets even more difficult if it isn't your own code. Commenting, design, layuot, good structure, documentation all reduce this fact but never remove it. I've seen plently of good programmers declare code "ugly" because it had a few warts but in reality they just couldn't understand it.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by nonsequitor ( 893813 )
      "I've seen plently of good programmers declare code 'ugly' because it had a few warts but in reality they just couldn't understand it."

      If you can't understand the code it's the author's fault. That is if you have mastered the syntax of the language of course.

      I'm currently working with an embedded code base that was written for job security. Everything is somewhat elegantly organized, but nothing is commented and functions are usually 200 - 500 ELOC. There aren't any notes explaining module interactions w
  • I find code can be exceptionally well presented but only if you look on a file by file basis.
    Most projects have nice clean stable blocks which to look at you just know its right.

    Other parts resemble a jungle and have no logical flow and are horrid.

    Whenever I am building an algorithm, it goes through the numerous rebuilds, after initially getting it working each one has more and more order until it looks like it will win a race.
    If the boss comes in and sees working code though, they don't understand this pre
  • Inconsistency (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anrego ( 830717 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @07:45PM (#19862867)
    I find the thing that really makes code unreadible is inconsistency. This is particularly true of languages like C++ where there is no well defined one true coding convention. If all your code is in house, this is not such a problem, because you can define your own coding convention and stick to it. If however you are relying on other libraries, chances are your going to end up with one library that names its function like_this, and one likeThis, and another fnct_LikeThis ...

    Worse is when you don't even define a coding convention for the code you throw into the mix. Now you have libraries with inconsistent naming, and multiple developers all using their own favorite notation.

    Additionally, their is inconsistency in the functioning of libraries. Some use function pointers, some work by inheritance, some (like glade) read the export list..

    I'm not a huge Java fan, but I think they have maintainability down pat. Very consistent language, well defined coding convention, and a mature set of defacto tools (JUnit, javadoc, log4j, struts, spring, hibernate, etc..) make it a lot easier to jump into older code because everything feels familiar. In most other languages you have to spend quite a bit of time just decrypting the existing code, and then more time learning the particular API's they've chosen.

    • Quite frankly, if you use third party libraries that fall outside your coding conventions (and you are absolutely right - most or all do), you should adapt them [wikipedia.org]. Create your own interfaces and make disparate libraries appear no different than the rest of your system. This simple tactic will cost you minimal overhead up front (interface design) with a huge savings in maintainability down the road (refactor to your own interfaces). If you are programming directly to third party APIs you are just asking for
  • Not to blow my own horn, but I happen to think the DICOM medical imaging libraries [dicomlib.swri.ca] that I maintain score pretty highly on code reuse, RAII, exceptions and general maintainability.
  • by squarefish ( 561836 ) * on Saturday July 14, 2007 @07:48PM (#19862893)
    The more GOTOs the better!
  • good source (Score:5, Interesting)

    by belmolis ( 702863 ) <billposer@alum.miSTRAWt.edu minus berry> on Saturday July 14, 2007 @07:50PM (#19862911) Homepage
    The source for Tcl [sourceforge.net] is widely considered by those who have worked with it to be unusually clean and clear.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jerryasher ( 151512 )
      I came in here to say exactly that. The design and source to Tcl and the source to AOLServer are actually clean, clear, and elegant. I think much of that is thanks to the Tcl/Tk Engineering Guide.

  • Such a good reputation, in fact, that an entire book has been devoted to reading its source code [spinellis.gr]. It has a reputation for correctness and portability (duh) and seems an interesting starting point.

    Since I am only getting started in C programming, though, I can't recommend this book. Or the NetBSD source, either.
  • libjpeg (Score:2, Interesting)

    by unkept ( 1128131 )
    the independent jpeg group's libjpeg is pretty well written in terms of style and design
  • TeX (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xouumalperxe ( 815707 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @07:58PM (#19862975)
    Can't say from personal experience, but I hear that the TeX source is a truly enlightning experience. Knuth is all for literate programming, you see.
  • The linux kernel (Score:3, Informative)

    by A beautiful mind ( 821714 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @08:01PM (#19862991)
    It's code is pretty good. The quality and formatting standards are pretty high for the kernel, which shows in the research about bugs/line ratios too.
    • damn good (Score:3, Informative)

      by r00t ( 33219 )
      Some parts are NOT for newbie wimps, but the complex parts are well-justified. Most of the core code ("kernel" directory) is very clean and readable.

      There are useful well-written abstractions, without the typical obfuscating layers of abstraction fluff.

      The code is written to run fast, while still being portable and readable.

      Static checking is all over, but not in-your-face annoying. Some of it involves compile-time assertions. Some of it involves a lint-like tool called "sparse" which makes sure that people
  • by the_kanzure ( 1100087 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @08:05PM (#19863025) Homepage

    Practically any time I hear a large software system discussed I hear "X is a #%@!in mess," or "Y is unmanageable and really should be rewritten." Some of this I know is just fresh programmers seeing their first big hunk o' code and having the natural reaction.
    If only mess you see when reading code, then programmer you are not-- a programmer must have the most serious mind, the deepest commitment. See more than mess, he must.
  • python (Score:4, Insightful)

    by codepunk ( 167897 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @08:12PM (#19863083)
    Just about all code I have seen written in python is great looking stuff..mainly because of
    the imposed indentation and clear language characteristics.
  • Amazing (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @08:15PM (#19863099)
    "X is a #%@!in mess," or "Y is unmanageable and really should be rewritten."

    I see those all the time as comments in my own code.

  • postfix (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hey ( 83763 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @08:17PM (#19863125) Journal
    postfix (the mail program) looks pretty nice to me.
  • by einhverfr ( 238914 ) <chris@travers.gmail@com> on Saturday July 14, 2007 @08:22PM (#19863165) Homepage Journal
    My first large project I ever attempted (HERMES, now abandoned, http://hermesweb.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] had, I believe, reasonably pretty code. Architecturally, there were some pretty parts too. But overall, the architecture was a mess simply because I didn't know better. I eventually abandoned it because I realized it was going to be impossible to fix the initial design mistakes without entirely replacing a large percentage of the code.

    My current large project is LedgerSMB. This deals with an entirely different magnitude of mess. Essentially we forked from a codebase which we have come to understand is nearly unmaintailable and yet we *have* to replace all the code because we have lots of users on the software who rely on it. Hence we are refactoring with an axe.

    The older codebase (SQL-Ledger/LedgerSMB 1.0/LedgerSMB 1.2) has a number of architectural limitations and issues, as well as a lot of evidence of an overall lack of architecture. If that weren't enough, the code is pretty problematic too. It could be worse (at least the codebase is reasonably readible if you put enough effort into it).

    I think it hits about 75% of the software programming antipatterns mentioned on Wikipedia, and extends some of them in weird ways. For example instead of just magic strings, we have magic comments (comments which are actually part of the program code and which deletion causes problems). And we have function calls which pass by "reference-to-deferenced-reference." In perl terms \%$ref.

    Hence we are moving everything to a new and *cleaner* architecture.
  • OpenSolaris (Score:5, Informative)

    by jlarocco ( 851450 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @08:24PM (#19863183) Homepage

    As large and old as it is, OpenSolaris [opensolaris.org] has fairly readable code. Plus, most of it has comments explaining why it's done the way it is.

  • by 3vi1 ( 544505 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @08:31PM (#19863229) Homepage Journal
    "Any app that doesn't need to be rewritten hasn't grown sufficiently beyond its original intent." - Jesse Litton, 1990
  • A experiment (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kabdib ( 81955 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @09:05PM (#19863445) Homepage
    I wrote a Perl filter that took C code as input, and applied all kinds of "unprettifications" to it (removing comments, collapsing variable declarations, introducing random curly-brace and indentation styles, removing whitespace or adding strange whitespace). The output looked like it had been written at 3am by a hung-over ex-FORTRAN engineer who had just discovered FORTH.

    Then I demonstrated that a bunch of code checked into our system looked like it had *already* been run through this tool. After the public shaming, a couple of the offenders cleaned up their acts for a while, but they're back to their old tricks.

    These days I'm working on a project where all the devs are really, really serious about the formatting and naming conventions. Some of the rules suck, in my opinion, but there's a lot to be said for consistency.

    [In the 80s, HyperCard team at Apple used to regularly run their sources through a Pascal formatter. The code, in a friend's words, "looked ironed." Unfortunately I haven't run across any good C++ formatters.]
  • by Okian Warrior ( 537106 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @10:06PM (#19863771) Homepage Journal
    Phoenix Technologies used to make both BIOS and printer software. The printer software department split off and became a different company, and then I lost track of them...

    They made printer software that went into virtually every printer not made by HP at the time. Canon, Ricoh, Lexmark, or whoever would come out with new hardware and license the software from Phoenix. Yep, some of my code is in every Lexmark printer right now.

    They had a couple hundred thousand lines of code that did PCL, GL, and Postscript for the consumer market, and it was the most readable and well developed code I have seen. Comments were explanatory, variables were well named, and execution paths were well defined and easy to follow.

    They really had their act together for testing as well, with an elaborate and comprehensive regression suite that checked *every* aspect of all of the [printer] languages, and a team of QA people who would go over the results nightly. I'm not making this up - you would come in to work in the morning and there would be maybe 5 E-mails from QA outlining bugs which were either in your code or assigned to you for reasonable reasons.

    We did the software for the first Lexmark printer. The first internal release gathered 900 bug reports from QA. When we went to market there were 7 remaining, all of which were deemed inconsequential.

    When you are in the commercial market making fixed-program computers (dishwashers, printers, cell phones, VCRs) you don't have security updates and new versions, and a recall is usually out of the question. It's much cheaper to do all of your QA up front and ship a quality product.

    In my opinion we've grown sloppy in the programming business. I've been a contractor for the past 30 years and I haven't seen anyone else who comes close to true quality procedures. Even FAA safety certified stuff is usually hokey and obscure. Thank god we've still got human pilots.

    Having seen the procedures firsthand I have an appreciation of how easy and valuable it all is. No one else seems to understand that, and so everyone keeps running around putting out fires and slipping deadlines.

  • Bourne Shell (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Repton ( 60818 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @10:20PM (#19863839) Homepage

    The Bourne Shell [tuhs.org] must get some kind of mention here. What do you do if you prefer ALGOL to C? Why, #define your own syntax [tuhs.org], and thus turn boring old C code into a thing of beauty [tuhs.org].

  • by Cassini2 ( 956052 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @10:34PM (#19863911)

    Many pieces of old code aren't pretty for a fairly defined set of reasons:

    1. a) Debugging Ensure you actually have an appropriate way of debugging the code. The systems I work with are embedded and run 7x24. People will say: it failed last week on Wednesday at 3:00 A.M., we got it working, but can you fix the problem? The problem may not actually be your code, it could be another piece of equipment. In any case, you need to figure this out from the logs. In my experience, many "pretty" programs are too small to justify extensive logging. After logging is included, the programs become less "pretty" but much more maintainable.

    1. b) Refactoring after Debug Sometimes the results of the debug will show a major design error in the program. You now need to implement a major architectural change that really was not originally intended. You have good modular code when it can withstand these major design changes in a relatively smooth manner.

    2. Failure to handle common areas of problems well These include:

    2. a) Strings Does your program have the ability to smoothly handle unicode/UTF/HTML/locale specific strings? Every different language you port your application too, and every different program you talk with, will all have differing definitions of what is a string. My favorite test case is CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled) machinery. Some CNC machines expect embedded nulls inside the strings. The embedded null requirement affects a surprisingly large number of string libraries.

    2. b) MessageBox() Invariably in a big program it will be unacceptable to allow it to hang on a modal dialog box like MessageBox(). How are you going to handle it? What if a library call executes a modal dialog box?

    2. c) Handling Exceptions For a simple prototype program, handling exceptions is not a big deal. In a production application, all the exceptions must be handled appropriately and the program must be able to continue when exceptions occur. The error handling code often exceeds the size of the original program.

    2. d) Third Party Libraries / Operating Systems (Windows) The amount of code devoted to covering up mistakes in other code is amazing. Unfortunately, unless coding on an open platform, one must accept the costs of the additional code. When starting a new project, I recommend thoroughly stress testing any new libraries that will be used. Thus one can find the killer bugs that significantly affect design decisions.

    I would appreciate any feedback/additions to the items on this list.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      Thats a good list, but I would add a third.
      3) Failure to define the problem space/ failure to refactor
      If you are using the agile programming approach in a haphazard way, or even if you are using a waterfall in a rapidly changing, unpredictable area of problems. You design your code to do what it needs to do in the most efficient way possible to do what needs to be done now, without worrying about what might happen in six months.

      Sometimes six months later the basic assumptions you made
  • by tadghin ( 2229 ) on Saturday July 14, 2007 @11:53PM (#19864327) Homepage
    that he thought Bill Atkinson's MacPaint was the most beautiful program ever written. Hearing this, Andy Hertzfeld made it a priority to recover the source code from an old Macintosh diskette. He contacted me because he was a bit worried about Apple's reaction if he just released it on the net (since it was Apple property), and I advised him to get the Computer History Museum involved if he didn't want to take the risk. I believe that he donated the code, but I'm not sure what the Museum did to have it made available.
    • by Sits ( 117492 ) on Sunday July 15, 2007 @03:52AM (#19865279) Homepage Journal
      Andy mentions this topic towards the end of an interview with Bob Cringely on Nerd TV. At the bottom of this archive of NerdTV episodes [pbs.org] is a link to episode number 1 in a variety of formats. Here's the transcript of the Nerd TV interview [pbs.org] where Andy says

      So I was thinking of putting it on the site, Apple would send me a cease-and-desist, I'd take it down, but it would be out there then. But I was just a little too chicken. Finally Tim O'Reilly came up with the brilliant solution of donating it to the Computer History Museum as a historic artifact. Perhaps they could get permission from Apple. So that's what we did. It took a few months but [i]n August Apple approved the donation of the MacPaint source code to the Computer History Museum. This was their first major software artifact in their collection so they made a big deal of it, made a video of us, and eventually the MacPaint source code will be available from their web site to anyone in the world.

      It's just occurred to me you are Tim O'Reilly. Wow, there are still some important folks that still post on /. ! Your company gave me some free books and a T-shirt when I was in my second year of University, thanks! Many of the well known people who used to post here have abandoned it in recent years so the feel of the place has changed. The only big name I still see around here is Jeremy Alison from Samba...
    • by toby ( 759 ) * on Sunday July 15, 2007 @09:23AM (#19866467) Homepage Journal
      As the inventor of "literate programming"[1], early practitioner of open source, and author not just of The Art of Computer Programming and its included programs, but some extraordinarily elegant and widely used software systems himself (including TeX and METAFONT). How many people's programs are worth printing as hardcover books?

      [1] mention also to Kernighan & Plauger's Software Tools.
  • by tadghin ( 2229 ) on Sunday July 15, 2007 @12:04AM (#19864381) Homepage
    So this post is perfectly timed. It's a collection of essays by leading software engineers about code they find especially beautiful.

    Andy Oram, the editor, thought it would be poor form to make a post himself, but heck, I thought: this is very relevant. The table of contents for the book can be found at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510046/toc.h tml [oreilly.com]

    It includes essays by Brian Kernighan, Jon Bentley, Tim Bray, Yukohiro Matsumoto, Simon Peyton-Jones, and many others. The code is intended not only to be beautiful but also instructive and in many cases re-usable.

    We're hoping to build an ongoing site around the book so additional examples would be very welcome.
  • by kfogel ( 1041 ) on Sunday July 15, 2007 @01:29AM (#19864757) Homepage
    Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald wrote an excellent chapter on this topic for O'Reilly's Beautiful Code [oreilly.com] book (just out). See Chapter 32, "Code in Motion". The code from their chapter is online here: http://www.perforce.com/beautifulcode/ [perforce.com]
  • by martinde ( 137088 ) on Sunday July 15, 2007 @08:54AM (#19866317) Homepage
    I've always been impressed by the BusLogic SCSI driver code in the Linux kernel. Anyone interested in what a good low-level, bit banging C program should look like should study its code carefully. Here is a randomly chosen snippet: /*
            The Modify I/O Address command does not cause a Command Complete Interrupt.
        */
        if (OperationCode == BusLogic_ModifyIOAddress)
            {
                StatusRegister.All = BusLogic_ReadStatusRegister(HostAdapter);
                if (StatusRegister.Bits.CommandInvalid)
                    {
                        BusLogic_CommandFailureReason = "Modify I/O Address Invalid";
                        Result = -1;
                        goto Done;
                    }
                if (BusLogic_GlobalOptions.TraceConfiguration)
                    BusLogic_Notice("BusLogic_Command(%02X) Status = %02X: "
                                                    "(Modify I/O Address)\n", HostAdapter,
                                                    OperationCode, StatusRegister.All);
                Result = 0;
                goto Done;
            } /*
            Select an appropriate timeout value for awaiting command completion.
        */
        switch (OperationCode)
            {
            case BusLogic_InquireInstalledDevicesID0to7:
            case BusLogic_InquireInstalledDevicesID8to15:
            case BusLogic_InquireTargetDevices: /* Approximately 60 seconds. */
                TimeoutCounter = 60*10000;
                break;
            default: /* Approximately 1 second. */
                TimeoutCounter = 10000;
                break;
            }

    This is some seriously low-level stuff, and it reads like English text. It totally changed my ideas about what this kind of code should look like! It believe it was written by the late Leonard Zubkoff.
  • by Organic Brain Damage ( 863655 ) on Sunday July 15, 2007 @10:47AM (#19867143)
    ...almost always want to re-write old code from scratch.

    Almost always without taking the time to understand what that old code does. Why? Because writing code is much easier than reading code. Reading code takes perseverance and ability to focus on large numbers of nit-picky details. Something our TV-age brains cannot easily do.

    The result of throwing out the old code without understanding what it is accomplishing is not always positive from a business perspective.

    Sure, sometimes crufty code is crap.

    But sometimes, like on a terminal emulator project I worked on in the mid-90's, the cruft was a bunch of code, accumulated from 1985 to 1995, that actually emulated the bugs in the firmware of 10 different manufacturer's dumb terminals. The programmers who wrote the applications that ran on these dumb terminals relied upon these bugs in the firmware and when the bugs disappeared, the applications broke.

    The company that tried to sell the "correct", "new", "elegant" terminal emulator hit a big solid brick wall called "market acceptance." The company that kept the cruft made roughly $4 million per year in profits and supported 25 employees' and their families for a decade while they developed new products.

    So, before you look at code in a shipping product and say to yourself "this is crufty crap and should be re-written from scratch" ask yourself this question: "Do I really understand what this crufty crap is doing?"
  • by Dunedain ( 16942 ) on Sunday July 15, 2007 @01:37PM (#19868747) Homepage
    Peter Norvig, now CTO of Google, agrees with you. Coding, like writing, is best improved by an alternating diet of writing and reading good works. He collected a few of the best he'd found in a book called Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, available from his web site or from Amazon: http://norvig.com/paip.html [norvig.com]

    It talks about AI because it was the 80s (92 by the time it hit shelves) and AI was cool---but the applications involved are now just what we call computing. It's not perfect: fifteen years have passed since it was written. In that time, C++'s STL and Boost have caught up with many features of Common Lisp. Java's come along and done well. Other interactive dynamic languages than Lisp exist: Python, for example. So you'll have to do some translating in your head---but for the same reason that Cicero is read by students of English rhetoric, Norvig should be read by C++ and Java programmers seeking mastery.
  • The Tandy CoCo (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fantastic Lad ( 198284 ) on Sunday July 15, 2007 @03:46PM (#19869845)
    Limitation is the Mother of Pretty Software.

    I remember when that cute little home computer came out, and all the programs were just so. . , plinky.

    Memory was a huge barrier, because you only had a small quantity of the stuff, and nobody understood the architecture of the system well enough to produce efficient programs.

    But back then, there were no video card upgrades. No faster processors and mother boards being produces every three months. If you wanted higher speed and cooler graphics, you had to write your code in more ingenious ways.

    And so that's what happened.

    By the twilight years of the Color Computer, the games people were writing on that thing were unreal. I remember looking at a few and thinking to myself, "This is the same computer? Wow! Humans rock!"

    When you reach the raw power limitations of your muscles but you still want to improve yourself in your combat skills, you take up Kung Fu. That's how it was in the old home computer days. Nowadays, though, (dang kids; I hadda walk fifty miles to school!) it seems that the bulk of improvement comes with the purchasing of increasingly large muscles.

    This is not to say that there is no software innovation. Heck, id Software did some pretty amazing things with software ingenuity. But I do remember thinking during the first few years of the big PC revolution, after the 486 was reaching its twilight, "You know, all this hardware innovation is great and all. . , (big muscles are cool), but part of me wishes it would stop cold for six solid years just what would happen when the programmers were really pushed. --You know, to see what one of these machines is actually capable of doing.


    -FL

  • Golden Code (Score:3, Informative)

    by SoopahMan ( 706062 ) on Monday July 16, 2007 @02:21AM (#19873699)
    What you're asking for is often called Golden Code or Golden Pages and usually exists within large software engineering companies. The problem with gaining access to such things is that they usually are considered very important to the organization who owns them, so they are not made public - they're more or less considered trade secrets, a guide to that particular company's proprietarily developed best practices.

    The other problem with easy access to Golden Code is that it must be constantly maintained to remain... "golden." So even if someone were to post a great example online, they're probably not getting paid to do so, so it's probably going to lose its luster in a couple years. Companies who maintain Golden Code usually assign a particular product to be coded in a "golden" way and continuously maintained in that perfect state as an example to all. This requires a lot of money.

    So the point is, if you want access to Golden Code, get hired at a big software company. There are a fair number of them out there if you look outside the most obvious markets. Enjoy.
  • OpenVPN, glib (Score:3, Informative)

    by cduffy ( 652 ) <charles+slashdot@dyfis.net> on Monday July 16, 2007 @10:18AM (#19875925)
    OpenVPN is very well-written C -- clean and accessible. Likewise for glib (not glibc, glib), presuming one likes the fun it does with macros.
  • Gled (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Kvorg ( 21076 ) on Tuesday July 17, 2007 @06:17AM (#19885627)
    Take Gled (http://www.gled.org/ - a recent CVS snapshot is preferable), a distributed C++ application builder with OpenGL/OpenAL/FLTK interfaces, object persistence and excellent extensibility.

    It certainly is not pretty the first time you look at it, that is probably true for any unique project, but if you look harder, you will see a strange tangle using ROOT, CINT the C++ interpreter, built-in C++ object dictionaries, elegant and fast network stack for object streaming and synchronization, and strangely effective remote procedure call interface. But my favourite is the auto-building FLTK gui.

    While remotely involved, I do enjoy this code immensely.
    Try building a new library for it and enjoy GUI-enabled objects in minutes... (There is even a scratch for a TA-like game in one of the demos, not yet playable.)

After Goliath's defeat, giants ceased to command respect. - Freeman Dyson

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