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Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#113

Post by CyberDildonics »

jaybosamiya wrote: post #33

Not specifically "software" but this piece of Haskell code is the most beautiful code I've ever seen: quicksort [] = [] quicksort (x:xs) = quicksort [y|y =x]

Will you still think that when you realize it isn't actually a quicksort?

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#115

Post by kpil »

muzani wrote: post #106

JSON. The way it displays and organizes complex data, better than other standards like CSV or XML. Or the things that use tables. When I first started programming, I had two favorite ways of storing data - INI and arrays. INI for its elegant key/value style. Arrays were just natural because of the way computers think. I spent months trying to mold these two things together; how would you actually store key-value thin…

It's having a rather half-hearted schema definition language though, and the json-encoding itself contains a few fuzzy corners, lacking important data types, and is to be honest not particulary sophisticated.

On the other hand, it's readable, good enough for most tasks, not overly complex, and it's nicer than XML. That is not a small acomplishment.

Still... I am waiting for ASN.2 ... All good features and ideas from ASN.1 without everything bad, which is rather much too :-)

One good idea from ANS.1 is "criticality", how important a future extension to a protocol is, which means that older participants can still handle newer messages, if they contain no "critical" extensions.

Another good thing is that the encoding is detached from the schema representation, which is too good for people to appreciate. You can use the same schema to send XML, BER (original simple tag-value binary format), PER (no unneccesary bytes are sent), or plain strings. (No JSON yet - at least in the standard)

In that way, it's possible to select encoders that suits the mission. Send human-readable data when size/speed/consistency does not matter, and packed super efficient messages when sending from a space probe. Same schema.

ASN.1 is ugly as hell though, and clearly designed by committee.

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#117

Post by rahimnathwani »

BigJono wrote: post #109
paulsutter wrote: post #61

The Deepmind Atari Player is only 22KB of source code: https://sites.google.com/a/deepmind.com/dqn/ If you haven't seen the video it's remarkable: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EfGD2qveGdQ

When he says "the algorithm is given just the pixels", does that mean it's not given any information about the game itself, like the objective? How does it know how to measure it's own success?

This paper[0] says "In addition it receives a reward rt representing the change in game score."

[0] https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~vmnih/docs/dqn.pdf

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#118

Post by tbrock »

Hovertruck wrote: post #112
tbrock wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh right, whatever Kenneth Reitz did then

Notably the "requests" library

That's the one! The reason I fell in love with requests was because it was leagues better than python's own http lib. Pay attention to the way he designed he API, it's genius. Updated my comment.

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#119

Post by e12e »

enneff wrote: post #98
mtrn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turbo Pascal 5 got me into programming. I wish people would build smaller things again.

I also learned to properly program using Turbo Pascal. You might enjoy Go. I find its small language, library, and tools that I can keep in my head leave me feeling similar to how I felt using Turbo Pascal back in the day.

Or perhaps Nim: http://howistart.org/posts/nim/1 (That article btw, is itself an example of beautiful software. So short and sweet, and still manage to cover a pretty deep rabbit hole of computer science and plain fun, with it's mandelbrot-in-brainfuck-in-nim)
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