Bryan Cantrill recently wrote a blog entry, where among other things, he philosophized on the concept of “perfect code”. He compares software to math, arguing that Euclid’s greatest common denominator algorithm shows no sign of wearing out, and that when code achieves perfection (or gets close to perfection), “it sediments into the information infrastructure” and the abstractions defined by that code becomes “the bedrock that future generations may build upon”. Later, in the comments of his blogs, when pressed to give some examples of such perfection, he cites a clever algorithm coded by his mentor to divide a high resolution timestamp by a billion extremely efficiently, and Solaris’s “cyclic subsystem”, a timer dispatch function.