Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?
Perhaps I'm jaded, but I notice that all the examples given here are developer tools or otherwise things with well scoped functional inputs and outputs (e.g. ffmpeg).Anyone have an example of a consumer application that has a good codebase? Chromium, GitLab, OpenOffice, etc? I feel like such applications inherently have more spaghetti because the human problems they're aiming to solve are less concretly scoped. Even something as simple as "Take the data from this form and send it to the project manager" ends up being insanely complex and nitpicky. In what format should the data be sent? How do we know who the project manager is? Via what format should the data be sent? How should we notify the project manager? When should we send the report? Some of these decisions are inherently inelegant, so I feel like you get inelegant code.