
The Exceptional Beauty of Doom 3's Source Code (2013) - areski
http://kotaku.com/5975610/the-exceptional-beauty-of-doom-3s-source-code
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zaroth
A few times the author expresses a rule as, "you should always do ____, unless
you can't," which I really like. Follow the rule just far enough, but never
further. When you find yourself thinking, "yeah, I just can't bring myself to
do that here..." trust yourself and code on!

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shmageggy
My two takeaways from this article are that beauty is in the eye of the
beholder, and that C++ is a horrible mess. Many of these examples I found less
than beautiful, but hey, to each his own. And I feel bad for the author and
anyone else who has to work in C++, since it forces you to choose between
genericity and readibility. Either your code is rigid, or it's a bloated,
unreadable mess.

Here's some "eyebleach" for anyone else who might be a little sad after
reading this; I've been learning Haskell and recently came across a definition
of a Fibonacci function that I found eminently beautiful.

    
    
        fibs = 0 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibs (tail fibs)

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CyberDildonics
Ignoring for a moment that Haskell doesn't accomplish the same goals as C++,
getting caught up in expressions is something I've found to be indicative of
amateur programming. The overall architecture of a piece of software is hugely
more important to productivity, speed, and correctness.

~~~
kungtotte
Amen. You know how often I have to write a Fibonacci function for real? Let
alone care about its elegance...

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Todd
I love that John Carmack took the time to comment on the article, providing
some background.

