
"I was really excited to write this article, because it gave me an excuse to really think about what beautiful code is. I still don't think I know, and maybe it's entirely subjective. I do think the two biggest things, for me at least, are stylistic indenting and maximum const-ness. A lot of the stylistic choices are definitely my personal preferences, and I'm sure other programmers will have different opinions. I think the choice of what style to use is up to whoever has to read and write the code, but I certainly think it's something worth thinking about. I would suggest everyone look at the Doom 3 source code
because I think it exemplifies beautiful code, as a complete package: from system design down to how to tab space the characters." John Carmack himself
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Member since:
2005-11-13
This is going to be a post about personal preferences ...

Being the novice programmer that I am, some of it was over my head, but other parts of it I could comprehend.
One thing that struck me is the part about where to put the braces. Personally, braces just look messy to me, so I'd rather use a language without them. IMHO, having a terminating statement like 'END IF' is a lot more elegant than having braces all over the f**king place.
And don't even get me started on semi-colons