“It is not sufficient to write programs that work. They must also be ‘elegant,’ either in code or function – both, if possible.”
J.M.Graetz
Martin Graetz recalled the development process behind the first video game – Spacewar! in a magazine interview. He mentioned that the quest for elegance in code and function was the reason why hackers at MIT were so involved in refining the game. Spacewar! was originally created on a PDP-1 which was capable of doing very simple mathematical calculations.
“on the early PDP-1s, anything stiffer than integer addition and subtraction had to be done by subroutine”
Creative Computing Magazine, August 1981
Keeping elegance in mind when facing the most restricted hardware limitations, creative coders haven’t changed a bit since 1962.
