Ask HN: Particularly elegant programs to study?
Examples help tremendously in learning any abstract subject. What are some famously well-written programs whose source is available to look at?
http://cr.yp.to/
BTW, his code is not easy to understand (quite the opposite) -- there are few source comments, and most of these are snarky, cryptic or both; and not only does he explain almost nothing on a global scale but oftentimes what he is doing might look, at first blush, kinda wrong, obtuse even.
But that's precisely the point -- there are a lot of idioms in there that most C programmers just wouldn't think of, especially if you're into minimalism (when it comes to things like dealing with strings, error handling, forking, etc).
Can you give some examples?
Don't be put off by the academic tone, at its heart the paper is about how to design abstractions.
Or, any of Knuth's other Literate Programs.
Also, the book "Beautiful Code" is an attempt along these lines, but personally, I don't find the programs there as beautiful as Knuth's.
"Support vector machines (SVMs) are a set of related supervised learning methods... The standard SVM takes a set of input data, and predicts, for each given input, which of two possible classes the input is a member of... Intuitively, an SVM model is a representation of the examples as points in space, mapped so that the examples of the separate categories are divided by a clear gap that is as wide as possible. New examples are then mapped into that same space and predicted to belong to a category based on which side of the gap they fall on." [wikipedia]
The Lua VM is a good example of something that isn't well written from a reading / understanding point of view, but is something that is well written from the 'it works' point of view.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/63hth/ask_reddi...