[abecedarius]

This is why I haven't yet read all of Peter Norvig's coding essays -- you can depend on him to publish code that's really hard to improve on (by the metrics he's writing for, like clarity). I like to write my own first before reading someone else's, because yes, it really does help you suck the juice out of a learning opportunity. Feynman and Turing both seem to have emphasized this too.

Really polished code is hard to find. I've been playing around off and on with Ken Thompson's regular expression search paper most recently.

[DamagedProperty]

I feel that the end result of polished code isn't useful unless you can see the process they went through to get there. It seems difficult to retrace their footsteps.

[abecedarius]

I've found that extra info to be interesting and useful, it's true, when I can get it. For instance, Norvig's Lisp-in-Python essays came out with the code still in some flux and I could compare his improvements to mine.