The Beautiful Code web site is just being launched. I'd like to give new-time visitors some perspective so that they realize, as they read particular postings, that no single posting should be taken as representative.
While writing the afterword to the book Beautiful Code, where I tried to draw some broad lessons from its essays, I finally decided to start by stressing their diversity:
Beautiful code surveys the range of human invention and ingenuity in one area of endeavor: the development of computer systems
Looking at the book again to draw inspiration for an interview with the maintainer of this web site (Bruce Stewart), I decided I could go even further:
Beautiful Code is a snapshot or time capsule of programming today. Everything is there, from the timeless and elegant to the dark corners of hackerdom. The range of languages, operating systems, and other environments represented is also historic. If you read the whole book, you pretty much know the whole field.
So my message comes down to the following. As I say in my afterword, you should make the "long and eventful journey through the whole book." And keep coming back to this site. The scope is broad, and if possible is likely to grow.
