Concise Computing: a PNG Parser in 20 lines
March 18th, 2013
By what standard should we measure if code is "beautiful"? I argue it should be not lines or speed, but rather conciseness and clarity. Can someone who is not familiar with the language still understand what the algorithm does? Can someone not familiar with the task still get a feel for how it works? This metric favors shorter code over longer, but not at the expense of readability. Beautiful code should be as close to expressing the underlying algorithm as possible. How close is the actual code to the most straight forward pseudo code?