
Ask HN: Who are some programmers (in)famous for their quirky coding style? - xelxebar
I recently stumbled across a some code written in extremely dense C, using a good bit of cpp to define common patterns down to single-character tokens. Apparently, the programmer is famous for this sort of style, but unfortunately I completely forgot his name.<p>Anyway, this got me intrigued in code that is written in principled, albeit, non-conventional styles.<p>I&#x27;m sure HN has stumbled across some absolute gems in its vast experience, so please share!
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bobbybidon
Quirky or bad? Elon Musk: [https://www.quora.com/Did-Elon-Musk-write-any-code-
at-X-or-Z...](https://www.quora.com/Did-Elon-Musk-write-any-code-at-X-or-Zip2)
(not a very good source but I remember it was mentioned in Elon's bio by
Ashlee Vance that his code was functional but had to be fully rewritten)

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greenyoda
I saw that kind of macro-based syntax a long time ago in some ancient Unix
code (Version 7 from Bell Labs) - I think it may have been in Bourne's shell
("sh"). It had macros like:

    
    
        #define BEGIN {
        #define END }
        ...
    

The author really seemed to prefer Pascal-like syntax to C.

A quirky programming style that was fairly popular at Microsoft at some point
was "Hungarian Notation", invented by Charles Simonyi:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation)

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pietroglyph
Are you thinking of Arthur Whitney?

His work was discussed on HN a few months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19481505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19481505)

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xelxebar
Oh my goodness. Yes. Thank you! This is the exact post I had in mind.

