Code golf

Code golf is a form of recreational programming where the goal is to accomplish a task in the minimum number of characters or bytes of source code. Unlike production work, nothing else is optimised — not readability, not speed, not maintainability. The constraint forces unusual language features and encoding tricks into service (bit-packing, lookup tables, abused syntax) that would never survive a code review. The hard part is that every byte removed typically compounds complexity elsewhere, so late-stage gains require global restructuring rather than local edits.