I'm not a god of hacking by any means, so perhaps I've just rarely experienced true code-block Nirvana. But, in my experience, the beauty of software doesn't of

I'm not a god of hacking by any means, so perhaps I've just rarely experienced true code-block Nirvana. But, in my experience, the beauty of software doesn't often arise from isolated, context-free blocks of code, just as it's hard to appreciate a great novel by cutting-and-pasting individual sentences and paragraphs. The authors of programming books struggle with this problem all the time. A lot of what they have to say only makes sense in the context of projects that are longer than what a book can contain. They can't provide convincing real-world examples, so they are forced to rely on toy examples, which often fail to get the point across. The pure-genius moments that I respect are the ones where the code blocks themselves are the most boring. When I first encountered (e.g.) jQuery, I realized I was in the presence of true genius. But I find that jQuery code is not very exciting reading, in and of itself. The typical line of jQuery is straightforward and transparent: It pretty much describes exactly what is going on, using idioms that you recognize from other languages (like CSS). The charm of well-written jQuery is that the individual statements are so straightforward that you can skim them -- you can look right past them and concentrate on the big picture, which is where all the important stuff is happening. It's the assembly of your blocks of code into a marvelous, comprehensible large-scale structure that is the challenge of software. And it takes time to appreciate that. That's why the phrase "deep into hacking" contains the word deep. You have to live inside a problem for a while before its true structure -- and the elegance of the best solution -- becomes clear. Of course, maybe all that I'm saying is that I'm not the intended audience for your proposed project. :) Other people, working on other tasks or with different languages or styles, might find it very useful!