This is an obscure one, but Mike Innes "[automatic] differentiation for hackers" tutorial. It's a code tutorial, not software, if that counts. Both the way it's constructed and the functionality of Julia that gets shown off here.
Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
261–270 of 422 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#262Emacs - although there's a lot of accumulated cruft in the form of whacky APIs and elisp functions, the design of Emacs is stunningly effective. The way that minor modes and keymaps are composed to customize the interaction mode for each individual buffer is clever and beautiful, to name just one thing out of many. And, as janky as elisp is, it's one of the few extension languages that's actually good at its job, and…
I use emacs, but would love to see a from scratch modern rebuild which deals with rough edges like threading and performance.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#263Not sure if games count as software but if they do - Factorio. I don't play much these days but I'm still utterly stunned how a relatively small, humble team of developers can build something so robust and performant. Granted, I've never really tried pushing the limits, but not once have I felt like the game is even breaking a sweat while processing thousands of machines, belts, and bots. It's a miracle to me. Their…
The developers have a blog post on how their codebase was a mess and difficult to work with, and their process of fixing it: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-366
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#264Emacs - although there's a lot of accumulated cruft in the form of whacky APIs and elisp functions, the design of Emacs is stunningly effective. The way that minor modes and keymaps are composed to customize the interaction mode for each individual buffer is clever and beautiful, to name just one thing out of many. And, as janky as elisp is, it's one of the few extension languages that's actually good at its job, and…
I use emacs, but would love to see a from scratch modern rebuild which deals with rough edges like threading and performance.
Oh, I completely agree! Emacs is only elegant along some axes, and those two are particular pain points for me, too.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#265Scrivener.
It's very focused on the task of writing - novels, short stories, screenplays. It pares away the parts of e.g. a word processor that are distracting (layout and the like), adds the functions of a database for tracking characters, locations, research and so on.
The underlying implementation is also storing as plain files in directories, so you can be comfortable that you'll be able to retrieve your writing if Scrivener no longer exists.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#266Git is the first example that comes to my mind. I'm aware that the concept can be difficult to grasp and that the cli commands seem weird at first. Once it clicks however, it's an absolutely fantastic tool. I'm still often amazed by what is possible with selective resets, diffs, greps, and most impressively interactive rebases. It makes a lot of otherwise difficult tasks much easier, and more elegant. Git is IMO one…
I agree that the concept behind git is powerful and elegant. I very much disagree that the implementation of git is elegant. For example: how many things does `git checkout` do? And I still don't understand what the point is of having a staging area. Or why I need to edit files in order to provide Git with instructions on what to do when it rebases. Or why adding hunks is so much more difficult than adding complete files.
Git is built upon a powerful and beautiful concept, but the Git CLI is just about the worst viable interface to that concept that you can build. There's a reason that there are so many other Git UIs, such as Magit, SourceTree, GitKracken, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#267Not a specific piece of software, but a characteristic of a limited percentage of anonymous internal systems--one of the most beautiful things to witness in the realm of design is a system undergoing catastrophic stress when the designers anticipated and planned for such events, and in usually a very short period of time you see the results of extensive planning spool out, design features hidden from view and unappreciated until this moment, kick in and recover/compensate in ways that feel almost magical.
For obvious reasons it is much more common to see this level of design in physical, life-critical systems like aerospace or automotive technology, but you do see it sometimes in software. Well designed services that under heavy load, various kinds of infrastructure failure, attack, or other kinds of scenarios well outside the bounds of normal expected operations intelligently compensate while signaling alerts with precise, useful information, and attempt whatever kind of recovery is possible.
This is hard to anticipate and often thankless to build in advance. It's always a stressful time when this behavior is visible, but it gives me a feeling of admiration for the perhaps long gone employees who built it.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#268The newish email service Hey. For me it’s been really successful in its attempt to be useful and a bit whimsical.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#269Peter Norvig's 27 line spell checker https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
Peter Norvig's python is so elegant: https://github.com/norvig/pytudes#pytudes-index-of-jupyter-i...
Yes! I'm working through the Design of Computer Programs on Udacity, which he teaches, and it's so enlightening to hear how he thinks through the conceptual framework of a program and see the code he comes up with to implement it. It's also nice to see that his code isn't always super elegant and that he's willing to write something readable and straightforward if it works well.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#270Not sure if games count as software but if they do - Factorio. I don't play much these days but I'm still utterly stunned how a relatively small, humble team of developers can build something so robust and performant. Granted, I've never really tried pushing the limits, but not once have I felt like the game is even breaking a sweat while processing thousands of machines, belts, and bots. It's a miracle to me. Their…
There's a series of space strategy/4x/combat sims called X where the latest entry seems to simulate entire economies and individual ships in real time. Dozens of sectors with hundreds of ships and dozens of space stations all humming along at 30-60 FPS.
Like Factorio it's incredible and makes me wonder wtf I was doing chaining together bullshit service APIs in my day job.