Beautiful JavaScript

CHAPTER TWELVE

Coding Beyond Logic

Daryl Koopersmith

0. The Basement

“Check it out!” I sat in a beat-up beige armchair in the basement of a college apartment building, staring at a jumble of charts, icons, and code. Two physicists-in-training beamed down at me. One of them said, “It’s pretty simple. You know what it does, don’t you?”

I paused, eyebrows raised, scanning the lines back and forth. The code read like a chalkboard full of high school algebra.

“No,” I shrugged. “You wrote a few loops and built a graph, but I have absolutely no idea what this code actually does.”

As they explained the graph, I couldn’t stop thinking. Where were the well-named variables? Where were the comments? Who taught them to code?

1. Quine’s Paradox

William Van Orman Quine was a logician who explored the limits of self-reference (along with many other philosophical and logical concepts) throughout the 20th century. In his essay “The Ways of Paradox,” he explores how indirect self-reference can be applied to the liar’s paradox (“The following statement is false. The preceding statement is true.”). Aside from reading like a convoluted interview question, Quine’s paradox unintentionally laid the foundation for a programming puzzle that has persisted for decades:

“Yields a falsehood when appended to its own quotation” yields a falsehood when appended to its own quotation.

This sentence specifies a string of nine words and says of this string that if you put it down twice, with quotation marks around ...