Surprised that no one mentioned elasticsearch here. The Java code is truly one of the best I have seen in any large open source Java project.
Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
11–20 of 262 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#12There is a really good list covered in detail here:
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#13Knuth's TeX. Set the standards for documentation, reliability, portability, typography, extensibility and scripting, is well into its fourth decade and is free software.
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#14daisydisk. oh it's smooth, harmonious colours, quintessential
edit: other comments seem to be from a source code perspective ?
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#15I really like reading most code from John Carmack, e.g. Quake 1-3. Much of it can be seen here: https://github.com/id-Software
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#16Varnish cache. 1) Configured via a special DSL (Varnish Configuration language) that gets translated into C, compiled and loaded into the Varnish process via a .so. Perfect combination of expressiveness and speed. You can even inline raw C code in it! 2) Heavy, good use of virtual memory. Varnish allocates quite a lot of gigabytes and leaves it up to the operating system to decide what should be in RAM and what shoul…
Nice, but they are solving a problem that is not all that hard. For example, I'd rather see a beautiful implementation of a concurrent garbage collector (which probably doesn't exist because it is almost impossible to achieve; a purely functional programming approach doesn't even apply here). Or how about a beautiful implementation of a web browser?
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#17Say what you like about Rails (or Ruby for that matter), but go and look at its source. It is well laid out, the commenting is extensive and descriptive, and it follows a natural flow.
The same can be said of the PostgreSQL source.
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#18If you mean applications, Adobe Illustrator
If you mean code, Smalltalk or LISP
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#19Arthur Whitney's one-page interpreter: http://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#20Varnish cache. 1) Configured via a special DSL (Varnish Configuration language) that gets translated into C, compiled and loaded into the Varnish process via a .so. Perfect combination of expressiveness and speed. You can even inline raw C code in it! 2) Heavy, good use of virtual memory. Varnish allocates quite a lot of gigabytes and leaves it up to the operating system to decide what should be in RAM and what shoul…
Nice, but they are solving a problem that is not all that hard. For example, I'd rather see a beautiful implementation of a concurrent garbage collector (which probably doesn't exist because it is almost impossible to achieve; a purely functional programming approach doesn't even apply here). Or how about a beautiful implementation of a web browser?
"Nice, but they are solving a problem that is not all that hard."
Apparently it was hard if it took that long to get a great, clean, FOSS solution to the problem.