HN stories about Whitney's code tend to predictably attract a lot of comments about the coding style, so I thought I'd share a couple of positive discussions from previous related posts.

Here's one from one of my favourite HN commenters posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25902615#25903452 (Jan 2021):

"Its density is many times higher than most C programs, but that's no big obstacle to understanding if you don't attempt to "skim" it; you need to read it character-by-character from top to bottom. It starts off defining some basic types, C for Character and I for Integer, and then the all-important Array. This is followed by some more shorthand for printf, return, and functions of one and two arguments, all of the array type. The DO macro is used to make iteration more concise. Then the function definitions begin. ma allocates an array of n integers (this code is hardcoded for a 32-bit system), mv is basically memcpy, tr (Total Rank?) is used to compute the total number of elements, and ga (Get/Generate Array) allocates an array. This is followed by the definitions of all the primitive operations (interestingly, find is empty), a few more globals, and then the main evaluator body. Lastly, main contains the REPL. While I don't think this style is suitable for most programmers, it's unfortunate that the industry seems to have gone towards the other extreme." -- userbinator

Here's another from the same commenter on a different story at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39026551#39038364 (Jan 2024):

"There's something very satisfying about how this style seems to "climb the abstraction ladder" very quickly, but all of those abstractions he creates are not wasted and immediately put to use. I think much of the amazement and beauty is that there isn't much code at all, and yet it does so much. It's the complete opposite of the bloated, lazy, lowest-common-denominator trend that's been spreading in many other languages's communities." -- userbinator

Another from the story at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40544283#40544491 (Jun 2024):

"For people not accustomed to the style of Whitney, you can read various HN threads from the past to learn more about why he writes programs the way he does. It's deliberate and powerful." -- hakanderyal

One more from the same story at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40544283#40545004 (Jun 2024):

"Whitney is famous for writing code like this, it's been his coding style for decades. For example, he wrote an early J interpreter this way in 1989. There's also a buddy allocator he wrote at Morgan Stanley that's only about 10 lines of C code." -- papercrane