Three Beautiful Quicksorts
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters point to it as programming inspiration and as a source of Bentley's anecdotes about adding function by deleting code.
What it is
Jon Bentley walks through three implementations of Hoare's Quicksort, from a dozen-line C function to a series of systematic code transformations that make the program ever simpler and more powerful. It is a Google Tech Talk on code elegance and program derivation.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2010 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends erre · 2013-05 · on “A regular expression matcher By Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan (2007)”
Ah, and Jon Bentley's chapter about quicksort, along whose lines there's a (also very interesting) Google Tech Talk: [this video]
Recommends tonym128 · 2023-08 · on “Ask HN: Where do I find good code to read?”
I'm sorry these are videos, but your question made me think of these. If you're looking for programming inspiration I love these videos Jon Bentley - Three Beautiful Quicksorts [this video] Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle [LINK]
Cites ehsanul · 2010-02 · on “-2000 Lines Of Code”
I'm reminded of this Google Tech Talk, where the speaker (Jon Bentley) refers to a colleague's praise of someone who "adds function by deleting code": [this video] Edit: Fixed quote