Surfing for fun and I came across
Computer Chess / Chess Engines (Winboard) & Chess Programming Info [Chessopolis > Chess Links] -- a large list of chess engines of the freeware, shareware, and open-source variety. Of course I forgot to mention GNU chess which is pretty good (though I don' t find the code very instructive). I have experience under the hood of TSCP so I could talk about that. Reading homepages, Beowulf claims to focus on readability and teaching of chess programming.
Also, I am a language geek so I was thinking that a C compiler could be targetted to your source language. That way you would not have to handle the mulit-dimensional arrays or structs calculations. Just a thought.