Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#1

Post by ponderatul » Sun, Mar 13, 2016, 3:49 PM UTC

So I've been reading Paul Graham's - Hackers and Painters. A bit late, I know. And I find his ideas fascinating. One that struck a chord with me, was the idea of taste, recognising good taste. I'd like to know examples of beautiful software and what makes it beautiful.

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#2

Post by w8rbt » Sun, Mar 13, 2016, 4:02 PM UTC

Personally, 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.

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#3

Post by stray » Sun, Mar 13, 2016, 4:16 PM UTC

The most beautiful I'm aware of is Robert Strandh's SICL (https://github.com/robert-strandh/SICL). CL-PPCRE (https://github.com/edicl/cl-ppcre) is very nice as well, imo.

What makes them beautiful? They're very straight forward and clearly communicate what they're doing, and how.

And the parentheses in their language of choice softens the visual display of the code -- while the semantics of the language cause the shape of the code to communicate quite a bit about how the machine will go about executing it.

There are no surprises.

In terms of conceptual beauty, it'd be hard to beat Screamer (https://github.com/nikodemus/screamer).

What makes this beautiful? The way it makes a hairy problem seem simple and straight-forward.

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#4

Post by spotman » Sun, Mar 13, 2016, 4:34 PM UTC

Redis is my favorite example. It's some of the easiest to read, digest, and modify source code out there.

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#5

Post by eternalban » Sun, Mar 13, 2016, 4:42 PM UTC

Beautiful software =/= beautiful code.

Beautiful software: Java Virtual Machine (the code? could be entirely un-beautiful ;)

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#6

Post by malux85 » Sun, Mar 13, 2016, 4:44 PM UTC

In terms of source code? If so my favourites to read are: LLVM and Clang. Redis. TensorFlow. Doom. Sha256k (the one Bitcoin core uses).

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#7

Post by julie1 » Sun, Mar 13, 2016, 4:46 PM UTC

Drivers.

The interface between the physical world and the digital world. They are the lenses of computers as much as its magic.

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#8

Post by percept » Sun, Mar 13, 2016, 4:49 PM UTC

spotman wrote: post #4

Redis is my favorite example. It's some of the easiest to read, digest, and modify source code out there.

antirez as Italian Renaissance code painter?

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#9

Post by xkarga00 » Sun, Mar 13, 2016, 4:54 PM UTC

All of the btcsuite code (btcd, btcwallet, ...)

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#10

Post by hebdo » Sun, Mar 13, 2016, 4:55 PM UTC

Varnish cache.

1) Configured via a special DSL (Varnish Configuration language) that gets translated into C, compiled and loaded into the Varnish process via a .so. Perfect combination of expressiveness and speed. You can even inline raw C code in it!

2) Heavy, good use of virtual memory. Varnish allocates quite a lot of gigabytes and leaves it up to the operating system to decide what should be in RAM and what should be on disk.

3) LRU garbage collection of cached objects requires a synchronized priority queue. Varnish people transformed the decades old idea of implementing a heap in an array that every CS graduate knows and came up with a faster, paging-aware solution (http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327).