The perfect program

One day, a frustrated novice came to Master Foo for help. “Master”, the novice said, “I am deeply ashamed of my programs; no matter how hard I try, they become less and less elegant the more I work on them. My business logic is littered with edge cases. My abstractions are leaky. There are ugly optimizations everywhere. Surely there must be some way to write code that’s both elegant, performant and extensible?”

Master Foo replied: “I have a program in my study which posseses all the properties you seek. If you wish, I can show it to you. You can learn much by studying it”

The student’s eyes lit up, and he followed his master into the study. Master Foo booted up his computer and opened up a file. The file contained a single line:

int main void { return 0 }