My code is always super elegant compare to the rest
Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
341–350 of 422 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#342Rollercoaster Tycoon! The game is beautiful, performant, and almost entirely hand-written assembly by one guy. Plus, the parks themselves can look very elegant (kind of like factorio factories). https://www.pcgamesn.com/rollercoaster-tycoon/code-chris-saw...
Art for RCT 1-2 was made by Simon Foster, and most of the objects were made in 3D, then rendered into frames.
http://www.chrissawyergames.com/feature3.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UKKaTGwIqc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6Fci7NWYUo (videos by Simon Foster, from https://redd.it/32jind)
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#343Not 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…
Factorio really is a bit of a modern marvel, even HUGE factories don't seem to run poorly at all and I genuinely have no idea how. Other similar games made since (Satisfactory comes to mind) seem to struggle with things like keeping track of resources on belts at scale, which IMO is a perfectly understandable problem to have but still makes factorio that much more impressive.
They have some fantastic dev blogs, such as this one on belt optimisations
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#344I think an honorable mention should go to PyGame.
I used this to show my kids how computer games work. I started out by showing them Unreal Engine 4 so they understand the modern tool chain, but that still leaves the mystery of how the game is represented inside the computer. Within minutes you can have some code drawing things, real graphics, on the screen. I cannot adequately describe how easy it is.
The experiment I did with them (young kids) was define some variables, draw a counter on the screen, start a loop, and then increment the counter. After they saw how that was represented to the computer it was easy to get them to imagine a character with all of his stats assigned at the beginning and then updated on every iteration of the loop as events take place. But with kids you've gotta move fast or they lose interest. PyGame makes creating games so fast you can literally pick it up and start teaching it to kids without knowing it yourself. It's that good.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#345Signal - The elegance here is the "Privacy-first Design". Every feature and code for Signal messenger is designed on collecting as little (or no) data as possible and it is an essential tool for folks like me who are tired of having tracking and ads nonsense in their most-used apps.
quite happy and impressed with signal too. realllyyyy cheering for them to become the default messaging app. i still use whatsapp heaps but would love to switch over
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#346IntelliJ and Goland. I mean both Eclipse and Visual Studio used to be good tools, but they lost it, however IntelliJ remains to be a good tool, throughout the years. Also Goland is much better than Visual Studio Code, imho.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#347I'd say Linux Mint. It combines everything that's good about Ubuntu while removing things like snap. Also the design is so much better but I feel that's a personal choice. But everything in linux just works so well now. I run 4 monitors on 2560 resolution on two separate amd cards and everything runs flawlessly. I have all the software for free and most OSS is just as good if not better for my work (except games and…
I do not like their upgrade solution being "reinstall the OS".
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#348Optimal ordered problem solver: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/oopscode.c
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#349Graphviz. Non-trivial graphs will make it produce hard-to-read output, and you can try fiddling with it forever to get better output. But it's still the first thing I reach for when I have to make a graph.
Agree. And after years of using it, I discovered osage, and after a few years more, gvpr. It gives and it gives. And yes, I'm forever fiddling with it to make it look the way i want it to, but in my heart I know the layout algorithms now better :)
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#350I'd say Linux Mint. It combines everything that's good about Ubuntu while removing things like snap. Also the design is so much better but I feel that's a personal choice. But everything in linux just works so well now. I run 4 monitors on 2560 resolution on two separate amd cards and everything runs flawlessly. I have all the software for free and most OSS is just as good if not better for my work (except games and…
Hmm. I was kicking the wheels on cinnamon the other day - but because it's not on Wayland it won't do mixed resolution displays out of the box, so it's not really viable for me. A pity, as I dislike snaps and the generally dumbed down direction of recent Gnome, so it would otherwise have been a good fit for me. For now I'm (still) on Ubuntu though.
You're right I did face some issues too with this when one of the monitors was different but the solution was rather simple. Just had to add a Modeline in some file called 10-monitors.conf(1) and then it worked perfectly until I replaced the 4th monitor with the same configuration, then no such hack was required.
You're right it didn't work out of the box but it was very simple thing even though I'm relatively new to linux myself (relatively speaking)
(1) https://gist.github.com/r0xsh/4d1c7219ee63e4cee0c7fe1077559b...