Name: 500 Lines or Less
ISBN: 9781329871274

500 Lines or Less

As we pointed out in The Architecture of Open Source Applications, architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study the critiques of many more. But most software developers only ever get to know a handful of programs well - usually programs they wrote themselves. This book provides you with the chance to study how 26 experienced programmers think when they are building something new. The programs you will read about in this book were all written from scratch to solve difficult problems. A web server, a pedometer, a Python interpreter, a web-based spreadsheet, and many more applications are written, in 500 lines of code or less, and described by their creators so that you can learn from their insights and their mistakes.

What Hacker News says

ramon156Feb 2025

Not a repo but I remember a book titled something like "architecture in 500 lines or less" that had really pretty explanations and diagrams

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vram22Apr 2024

The 500 Lines or Less section from https://aosabook.org/en/

The Architecture of Open Source Applications

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mumblemumbleOct 2023

Remembering that a line of code is a price you pay, and not an accomplishment in and of itself, is a valuable mindset to maintain. And I think that 500 lines is a comparable volume of code to digest across many languages. It may accomplish varying amounts of useful work, but that's beside the point. The purpose of this work is not to engage in an inter-language, inter-domain pissing match; it's to meditate on the human economics of software design. It says as much in the introduction: "500 Lines or Less focuses on the design decisions that programmers make in the small."

Thinking about these things does matter. This past week I refactored a somewhat challenging piece of code my team had been maintaining from several hundred lines of code to about 30, without playing code golf. And I found and removed bugs (and even a little bit of code golf) in the process. Similar to what the book's introduction suggests, a lot of this change was down to rethinking the abstractions and decomposition of the code. The original version apparently tried to force the problem to fit a preselected design pattern. Doing that instead of decomposing the problem according to its own natural structure really does seem to have resulted in a ~10X code bloat factor.

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iudqnolqSep 2023

You might like the book 500 Lines or Less, Experienced Programmers solve interesting problems

https://www.amazon.com/500-Lines-Less-Amy-Brown/dp/132987127...

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iudqnolqMay 2023

Check out the book "500 Lines or Less: Experienced programmers solve interesting problems"

I especially like the chapter "A Python Interpreter Written in Python": https://aosabook.org/en/500L/a-python-interpreter-written-in...

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chubotOct 2022

Thanks, definitely a good resource

Though I do think it's illumating to see the smallest, slowest code that implements the spec

Similar to the "500 lines or less" book, or say a TCP/IP implementation in Python

I cloned it, and it's ~3600 lines, which is very interesting. I didn't think you could implement anything that passes 95% of an sqlite test suite in that much code, as sqlite itself is at least 200K lines IIRC.

It has a ton of features built up over 20 years. Sure you save a lot by not having a disk pager, efficient data structures, and so forth, but still that's pretty small, and parsing/tokenizing is over 1000 lines of it.

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