I have worked on a very wide range of code.

I have to say that reading the code of Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat when I first came to Google astonished me, because I expected it to use a lot of obscure language features, and in fact it was extremely simple and clear. It ended up being very influential on me.

I have also worked for certifiable lunatics, like Vinnie Falco, who at one point was coding on a "foveal" theory where he hit return at the first break after 40 characters. Vinnie also felt that readability was a negative characteristic in code, because it allowed inferior developers to work on it.

My favorite quote from him, about a magic number: "if you don't know what 140 means, you shouldn't be working in this codebase." (I might add that there were actually two dramatically different meanings for 140 in the code!)