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Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#371

Post by Closi »

anthk wrote: post #122
Closi wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a definite 'excel-apologist' and think Excel is brilliant and incredibly powerful when used correctly, so the below may be biased but... > Elegant software doesn't normally need an interest group dedicated specifically to preventing people from misusing it. http://www.eusprig.org/ Plenty of the other software listed has user-error misuses (For instance C is listed, and by the same standard it could be considered…

Excel crapped out bioinformatics. It's a turd. Period.

Excel has an unrealistic barrier to performance to meet if we point to the fact that a desktop spreadsheet package is not good at being used for DNA and amino acid analysis.

We don't expect any other off-the-shelf technology to meet such a wide variety of use-cases, and somehow I think the statement 'excel is bad at processing bioinformatics data' speaks a large amount about how pervasive and flexible it is.

Besides, in reality Excel actually can handle the data perfectly fine if the data is brought in correctly (i.e. Data -> Get Data and using PowerQuery rather than just importing a file and hoping Excel works out the types correctly).

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#372

Post by fidelramos »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #262
throw10920 wrote: post #139

Emacs - 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.

Emacs 28.1 [0], recently released, has support for native compilation [1], which greatly speeds up some workflows.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/emacs/news/NEWS.2...

[1] https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/speed-up-emacs-libjan...

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#373

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

magarnicle wrote: post #307
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #136

tmux

Lots of people seem to use tmux instead of screen, but I can't see any great advantage to it. What am I missing?

Nothing, necessarily. Primary initial motivation for tmux seemed to be to create a BSD-licensed "screen" for the OpenBSD userland. In any event, tmux quickly appeared in NetBSD's package collection and I was an early user. Comparing the source code is where I saw a difference. Maybe I am just dumb but I found the tmux approach was easier to comprehend and I could edit tmux source easily whereas I found screen was more difficult learn and I never felt comfortable editing the source code. I also thought when it was released tmux's documentation was more elegant than screen's. I do not follow screen anymore. Things may have changed after screen finally got some competition.

This is not to say there is nothing one can do with tmux that one cannot also do with screen, or vice versa. There could be. I only opine that tmux is elegant, and more elegant than screen.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#374

Post by reacharavindh »

ZFS. It made filesystems and Software RAID elegant and accessible with an elegant interface and a pleasure to work with. It offers all the features that one would want in a file system without many shiny bloat.

Scrubs

Distributed parity

Hot spares

Encryption

Snapshots

Compression

Quotas

All in an intuitive way that led to an almost cult like following in the Unix/Linux admin world.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#375

Post by xtiansimon »

Software ?= software application

If yes, then I’ll offer an oldie but a goodie: Adobe Photoshop.

Many of its tools are intuitive. As a photo artist you don’t want the application getting in your way. It’s easy to learn how PS organizes multi-color/layer/channel images. You can do a lot with a little bit of knowledge of the application, so you can do the simplest things easily and quickly. With more application skill you can produce the highest quality images necessary for _any_ static image project.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#377

Post by btschaegg »

tjstebbing wrote: post #355

I'm going to say vim, and I expect to get yelled at by folk who don't use vim, but here's why I call it elegant software: Vim's entire command model is based on the simple composition of motion and action. Until you understand this you will never 'get' vim. You may be able to use it, even efficiently, but you will never understand how these two simple concepts when fully understood are a force-multiplier. Motion indi…

This. Plus: Macros.

I just recently had an opportunity to flex my "wizard muscles" in a case where we had to feed a test consisting of about a hundred similar messages with minimal differences (numbers) to a system in order to reproduce an issue.

  "Can't we try to reproduce this?"
  "Maybe, but we'd need a lot of messages in order to reproduce this."
  "And...?"
  "That's tedious."

  "Watch me" *grinning*
A couple of edits and a `100@q` later, we were ready to go.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#378

Post by SemanticStrengh »

habi wrote: post #369
SemanticStrengh wrote: post #257

The three of life is a fantastic design and use of openstreetmap software https://lifemap.univ-lyon1.fr/explore.html

OpenStreetMap?

Yes as you can see it doesn't look at all like the same thing and yet it use OpenStreetMap svg renderer, which is very clever
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