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I once wrote a web service that I deployed and then never had to maintain. I still have not discovered any bugs in it, and it has not needed any new features. It's still running now and has thousands of users a day.

That code is beautiful because I never have to look at it or tinker with it.

(For those wondering about security, it is deployed in containers that are destroyed and rebuilt from patched images on a daily basis. It does not use any web-hosted libraries.)

The original John McCarthy "Maxwell's Equations of Software" in Lisp.

Pretty much any code or pseudocode written by Donald Knuth.

Lisp in Small Pieces

Physically Based Rendering

Both books are outstanding examples of readable literate programs.

Hello world! is beautiful. And yeah, any language.

Ask HN: Beautiful Code