The Go standard library. At least two things coming together: A stripped down language, that explicitly aims to be readable and experienced programmers / authors.
Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
21–30 of 262 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#22Knuth's TeX. Set the standards for documentation, reliability, portability, typography, extensibility and scripting, is well into its fourth decade and is free software.
And after those four decades, I still can't figure out how to get my figures to appear where I want them.
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#23LuaJIT. It's a cutting-edge JIT with remarkably understandable algorithms and source. Every single piece of it is well thought out. Even the asm interpreters are pretty clean and explain why they work the way they do.
Mike Pall is a demigod.
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#24Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but from the UX side, Square Cash.
Does one thing, does it well with large responsive colorful UI that still displays everything you need to know. Is minimally invasive (debit card instead of bank account verification). Uses your existing contacts, so everything "just works" by default.
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#25TeX and Metafont. It'd be hard to find anything even matching these gems.
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#26Grand central dispatch is so beautifully designed. Both its API and just general use. It clicked with me the first time it got introduced and I abandoned bothering with NSOperarion
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#27Beautiful software =/= beautiful code. Beautiful software: Java Virtual Machine (the code? could be entirely un-beautiful ;)
I'm genuinely puzzled. What can be beautiful anywhere in the JVM?!?
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#28Surprised 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.
Maybe they should put that effort into their documentation ;)
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#29Personally, I like Tarsnap and anything from the OpenBSD project. Of course, this is highly subjective, and I would not call the code 'beautiful'. However, to me, these are a few examples of code performing complex tasks written in a simple, straight-forward way that I can follow and understand.
If you like the Tarsnap code, you should read the spiped code. Tarsnap is made ugly in places by needing to work with/around the original tar code it's based on; spiped is code entirely written by me.
Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?
#30It's funny to read what people think are beautiful apps here.
IMHO, the most beautiful software are always games and entertainment titles... After all that is the purpose.
Office 2013? It's very useful! I use a classic menu template and got rid of the ribbon, since the functionality is the same, but in my preferred format. Beauty does not come into play with office...
I can use it for creating beautiful PowerPoint and excel spreadsheets.
Code is never 'beautiful'. It's either concise, well-written and formatted well, or it isn't.