I don't know. I composed a lazy-evaluation library called promises.js for an ongoing project which I call "ducky": https://github.com/drostie/ducky/ https://gi

I don't know. I composed a lazy-evaluation library called promises.js for an ongoing project which I call "ducky": https://github.com/drostie/ducky/ https://github.com/drostie/ducky/ Now, it's 277 SLOC by GitHub's reckoning, and it solves a really esoteric problem (providing a language to wrap asynchronous calls in, so that you can write asynchronous code synchronously). The problem wouldn't even be particularly clear if you didn't know something about Node.js and how the API is set up. In that sense maybe you're right. But there's another sense in which you're maybe not right. Perhaps this is just me feeling too much fatherly affection for my code, but I like to think that even if you were baffled by the expected use of the project, you could still break promises.js into chunks (in fact, in the source it's done for you) which helps you understand what each of these methods is, and what it does, and how to use it to accomplish some bizarre and esoteric goal. So it's semantically ugly in a deep sense -- "what the hell is this doing, why am I reading this code" -- if you do not take the time to 'discover the beauty', to use your words. But it's semantically pretty in a much less profound sense; the code is pretty straightforward to look through, and the higher-order ideas are built straight out of lower-order ideas, which are clearly partitioned off, and so forth.