Linus Torvalds in an interview talked about the idea of good taste in code or what I like to call elegance. As one might expect from two slides meant to make a point during a talk, he omits a lot of details to keep it short and simple. This post digs into the specifics of his example (deleting an element from a list) and adds another example (inserting an element in a list) including working code.
This is an example of removing an element from a singly-linked list. It's one of the first data structures you learn about when you start learning about computer science and programming. The reason it doesn't show particularly good taste is because we have that condition at the end where we take a different action depending on whether the element we want to remove is at the beginning of the list or somewhere in the middle.
