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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?

#381

Post by dcminter »

somat wrote: post #254
dcminter wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

X11 has been able to do mixed resolution from the beginning. http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/

This may be technically true, but since I don't want to spend a lot of time messing with command line tools then it might as well not be.

Edit - To add a little context since that on reflection seems too dismissive...

I did try a whole bunch of things a while back, include several variations on xrandr stuff. I never did get to a place where all the following were true:

  Both screens were operating at their maximum resolution
  All app windows were appropriately sized (readable fonts, correctly scaled menu bars, etc.)
  Neither screen was blurry due to scaling
I wouldn't swear it was impossible but with recent versions of Ubuntu under Wayland I could have all three without having to do anything at the command line.

I love the command line. I just don't find messing around with config to make the basic system stuff work properly edifying.

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

#382

Post by svat »

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…

> it's a toolkit for creating text-oriented applications

Good examples IMO are Magit and Org-mode. They are basically large applications created in Emacs, and each so good that they are worth learning/using Emacs just for using them (I'd say AucTeX is also in this category).

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

#384

Post by jeppester »

Tomis02 wrote: post #339
jeppester wrote: post #184

Git 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…

The CLI is so confusing that Stackoverflow has a bunch of questions for things that should be easy or trivial by default. Last thing I would call git is "elegant". https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/git?tab=Votes

I knew there would be people commenting on this. But I don't think something has to be intuitive for newcomers to be elegant.

There are also posts here mentioning vim, which to most people is weird and useless at first.

Some tools takes effort to understand, but once you put in the effort, they become tremendously powerful.

I would say that they are elegant in that they allow you to do something otherwise difficult in an effortless and obvious way. Both vim and git does exactly that - once you've gotten to know how they work.

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

#385

Post by jjnoakes »

bbkane wrote: post #305
jjnoakes wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I've looked at Standard Notes and want to love it and switch everything over to it. This is the only thing holding me back is the lack of background sync on mobile: https://github.com/standardnotes/mobile/issues/45

I've started using plain git to sync my Markdown notes - https://www.bbkane.com/blog/how-i-take-notes/

I tried GitJournal but I got a bit scared by this: https://github.com/GitJournal/GitJournal/issues/241

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

#387

Post by vhanda »

jjnoakes wrote: post #385
bbkane wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've started using plain git to sync my Markdown notes - https://www.bbkane.com/blog/how-i-take-notes/

I tried GitJournal but I got a bit scared by this: https://github.com/GitJournal/GitJournal/issues/241

Hello GitJournal author here.

I was surprised to read "surprised" cause even if GitJournal choose badly, the history is still there.

Nevertheless thanks for letting me know. I'll bump it in my internal Todo list.

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

#388

Post by GoldenRacer »

camelcasing wrote: post #290
hatchnyc wrote: post #267

Not 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 unappre…

any examples?

One that I've always thought is really cool since I heard about it is the base of street signs. Instead of being cemented into the ground, signs are commonly bolted to a base so that they'll break away when hit. Some even have an incline that will throw the sign up and over your car. After learning this, I've started paying attention to signs I pass on walks or while driving and it's crazy how they are everywhere and I never noticed.

Here's a link with some more information: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/breakaway-hit-street-...

Another thing to look into if you find that cool is guard rail design. Modern guard rails have some cool features designed to reduce risks associated with hitting them.

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

#390

Post by thatfunkymunki »

version_five wrote: post #238
DC-3 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nice. One interesting choice is the decision to compute the number of observed words, N, as the default value of an optional argument, thereby ensuring that it is only computed once, while still limiting its scope to the function in which it is needed. Perhaps this is a common pattern but it's one I haven't stumbled across before. The short circuiting `or` chain is also pleasantly virtuosic. Sometimes a littl…

> One interesting choice is the decision to compute the number of observed words, N, as the default value of an optional argument, thereby ensuring that it is only computed once You're saying python computes an expression that's part of a default value when the code defining the function is run? I guess it makes sense now that i say it, I wouldn't have automatically assumed that. That's an interesting one to remember…

yeah, this has consequences for constructors too, you don't want to specify default values in the __init__ function signature because of this.
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