Bob Nystrom personal blog
The Hardest Program I've Ever Written – How a code formatter works (2015)
The hardest program I’ve ever written, once you strip out the whitespace, is 3,835 lines long. That handful of code took me almost a year to write. Granted, that doesn’t take into account the code that didn’t make it. The commit history shows that I deleted 20,704 lines of code over that time. Every surviving line has…
- Points
- 500
- HN comments
- 471
- Submissions
- 5
- Cited by
- 17 commenters
On Hacker News
| Submitted | Title on HN | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 27, 2020 | The Hardest Program I've Ever Written – How a code formatter works (2015) by goranmoomin | 500 | 125 |
| Jun 9, 2018 | The Hardest Program I've Ever Written (2015) by tosh | 303 | 76 |
| Mar 5, 2022 | The hardest program I've ever written (2015) by graderjs | 261 | 133 |
| Sep 9, 2015 | The Hardest Program I've Ever Written by skybrian | 242 | 76 |
| Oct 29, 2025 | The hardest program I've ever written (2015) by jacobedawson | 97 | 61 |
Cited in comments
Linked from 21 Hacker News comments by 17 different people, from Oct 2015 to Apr 2026.
Most recent:
