Please list a project of equal complexity that has been written beautifully from start to finish in your opinion. This myth of beautiful coding needs to stop! Code is not a masterpiece from Van Gogh, it needs to ship. This determines quality, not the usage of some obscure/mainstream/unreadable/oh-look-how-cool-I-am idiosyncracy of the language. If you ain't shipping, it's completely useless.
We believe we are more like machines than like other people. But at the end of the day we're the same trumped-up monkeys smashing away with imperfect tools.
If you look at our fellow productive monkeys, they aren't using the prettiest tools, no. But the tools they are effective with have a certain beauty to them. They often have a single purpose, and they do it very well (the Unix model knew this 40 years ago). Nicks and dents don't matter, unless they're on the working surfaces, in which case they have to be repaired or replaced, so resilience in certain dimensions is an absolute must.
A master does learn to work with their tools instead of against them, but within reason. If a better tool is available, or they can modify the existing tool to fit them better, they won't hesitate for a second to do it. That is what is meant by 'A craftsman does not blame his tools.' If you know you're using a bad tool, that's your fault. Get better tools.
The code, imo, is some of the highest quality js I've seen. It is also incredibly comprehensive and easily as complex.
High quality != shipping fast. They are separate quantities, it is easy to have one without the other but very rare to have both.
My point wasn't to ship crap, it was about obsessing on quality over actually shipping (and cutting some corners). This is something I learned at my first job, we obsessed over quality and never shipped. Guess what happened? :)
Details in this excellent summary comment by someone else: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9848097
I specifically recommend studying the "Project Oberon" book which is now available as a PDF from Prof. Wirth's own site, I believe.
libfreetype is an example of a great library, clean and well documented...
beautiful coding isn't a myth, it actually works... write code like poetry and it pays off 10 fold... less errors, easier to reason about, malleable... the benefits are extreme... try to actually experience something before making unfounded claims... i've been writing beautiful for over a decade now... once you realize code is written once and read 100 times, you'll come to the realization of doing it clean and right the first time pays of in the future, which means less work and bullshit...
> write code like poetry
When a code base reaches a certain size it's hard to write "beautiful code". Please don't pretend that it is just as easy when you have multiple complexities/priorities. If you write so called beautiful code in complex projects, good for you.