on beauty

Here I quote judofyr from a Hacker News thread. The following exemplifies why _why wasn’t just a coder, he was also a poet.

Interestingly, camping.rb on the other hand is not very pretty or correct: http://github.com/camping/camping/blob/master/lib/camping.rb, and that’s also what makes it so beautiful in my opinion.

Oh well, let me finish with a little quote from _why:

On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 02:47:39PM +0200, zimbatm wrote:  
> This is not that hard to do. Maybe I should add some shortening tricks  
> document. I propose platterizing to be done only before release.  
 
No, let's not have rules.  I don't feel comfortable with having  
coding standards or any protocol on Camping.  The point of Camping  
is to have very ugly, tricky code that goes against all the rules that  
people make for "beautiful" code these days.  To show that ugly code  
can do beautiful things, maybe.  
 
I don't want to demonize anyone here, I just want to express the  
ideas that make Camping different.  Camping's personality is 80x50.  
It is like the little gears of a watch that are all meshed together  
into a tight little mind-bending machine.  The challenge of Camping  
isn't to figure out how to automate obfuscation.  The challenge is  
to bring new tricks into the code that push Ruby's parser and make  
everyone look twice.  
 
Not all code needs to be a factory, some of it can just be origami.  
 
_why