Beautiful Code [4]
Chapter 10, The Quest for an Accelerated Population Count, by Henry S. Warren, Jr., reveals the impact that some clever algorithms can have on even a seemingly simple problem.
Chapter 11, Secure Communication: The Technology Of Freedom, by Ashish Gulhati, discusses the directed evolution of a secure messaging application that was designed to make sophisticated but often confusing cryptographic technology intuitively accessible to users.
Chapter 12, Growing Beautiful Code in BioPerl, by Lincoln Stein, shows how the combination of a flexible language and a custom-designed module can make it easy for people with modest programming skills to create powerful visualizations for their data.
Chapter 13, The Design of the Gene Sorter, by Jim Kent, combines simple building blocks to produce a robust and valuable tool for gene researchers.
Chapter 14, How Elegant Code Evolves with Hardware: The Case of Gaussian Elimination, by Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek, surveys the history of LINPACK and related major software packages to show how assumptions must constantly be re-evaluated in the face of new computing architectures.
Chapter 15, The Long-Term Benefits of Beautiful Design, by Adam Kolawa, explains how attention to good design principles many decades ago helped CERN's widely used mathematical library (the predecessor of LINPACK) stand the test of time.
Chapter 16, The Linux Kernel Driver Model: The Benefits of Working Together, by Greg Kroah-Hartman, explains how many efforts by different collaborators to solve different problems led to the successful evolution of a complex, multithreaded system.
Chapter 17, Another Level of Indirection, by Diomidis Spinellis, shows how the flexibility and maintainability of the FreeBSD kernel is promoted by abstracting operations done in common by many drivers and filesystem modules.
Chapter 18, Python's Dictionary Implementation: Being All Things to All People, by Andrew Kuchling, explains how a careful design combined with accommodations for a few special cases allows a language feature to support many different uses.
Chapter 19, Multidimensional Iterators in NumPy, by Travis E. Oliphant, takes you through the design steps that succeed in hiding complexity under a simple interface.
Chapter 20, A Highly Reliable Enterprise System for NASA's Mars Rover Mission, by Ronald Mak, uses industry standards, best practices, and Java technologies to meet the requirements of a NASA expedition where reliability cannot be in doubt.
Chapter 21, ERP5: Designing for Maximum Adaptability, by Rogerio Atem de Carvalho and Rafael Monnerat, shows how a powerful ERP system can be developed with free software tools and a flexible architecture.
Chapter 22, A Spoonful of Sewage, by Bryan Cantrill, lets the reader accompany the author through a hair-raising bug scare and a clever solution that violated expectations.
Chapter 23, Distributed Programming with MapReduce, by Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, describes a system that provides an easy-to-use programming abstraction for large-scale distributed data processing at Google that automatically handles many difficult aspects of distributed computation, including automatic parallelization, load balancing, and failure handling.
Chapter 24, Beautiful Concurrency, by Simon Peyton Jones, removes much of the difficulty of parallel programs through Software Transactional Memory, demonstrated here using Haskell.
Chapter 25, Syntactic Abstraction: The syntax-case Expander, by R. Kent Dybvig, shows how macros—a key feature of many languages and systems—can be protected in Scheme from producing erroneous output.
Chapter 26, Labor-Saving Architecture: An Object-Oriented Framework for Networked Software, by William R. Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt, applies a range of standard object-oriented design techniques, such as patterns and frameworks, to distributed logging to keep the system flexible and modular.
Chapter 27, Integrating Business Partners the RESTful Way, by Andrew Patzer, demonstrates a designer's respect for his programmers by matching the design