Comment by JumpCrisscross

I think this happens all the time actually, but it's often smaller scale. Like someone writes a neat architecture to do X at their company, and later someone else walks in, looks at this code and sees it's now super easy to do Y, which then turns out to have immense user/business value.

> I don’t think I’ve heard of elegant code leading to discovery on its own.

Every software design pattern came from elegant code. People wrote code, summarize code, learnt from code, and taught code. That's discovery

> elegant code

Usually it's the opposite. "That's in prod? And it works? It shouldn't work and I thought it was doing something else. Why does it work?"

But it has. Think of design patterns and other programming paradigms (logic programming, functional programming, etc).

you must not be familiar with haskell

> I don’t think I’ve heard of elegant code leading to discovery on its own.

I’ve not heard of it either, but code is an abstraction of math, so I don’t see why this couldn’t theoretically happen.

Anecdotally, I’ve started spending time advancing my math skills beyond the early college level I stopped at and I’ve frequently found I already know concepts of more advanced math - I just didn’t know what they were called or how to apply them to an equation on paper, but I’ve been using them for years and intrinsically grasped the underlying academics.