Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software? • Hacker News Board

amelius wrote: post #40

nickpsecurity wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nice, but they are solving a problem that is not all that hard." Apparently it was hard if it took that long to get a great, clean, FOSS solution to the problem.

Well, in any case, I've never heard of a government software project being overdue because their proxy cache contained spaghetti code :) To be clear, I'm not trying to denigrate this project in any way. I'm just saying that the complexity of the problem should be taken into account here.

I think the complexity of the problem actually speaks in favour of Varnish. The Unix philosophy of writing software is based on the principle of doing one, possibly small thing very well. And that's exactly what Varnish does: it is a reverse-proxy cache that can optionally do a bit of preprocessing on the incoming HTTP requests.

Besides, it's not trivial to write a high performance HTTP cache.

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

#45

Post by amelius » Sun, Mar 13, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

c_lebesgue wrote: post #44

amelius wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in any case, I've never heard of a government software project being overdue because their proxy cache contained spaghetti code :) To be clear, I'm not trying to denigrate this project in any way. I'm just saying that the complexity of the problem should be taken into account here.

I think the complexity of the problem actually speaks in favour of Varnish. The Unix philosophy of writing software is based on the principle of doing one, possibly small thing very well. And that's exactly what Varnish does: it is a reverse-proxy cache that can optionally do a bit of preprocessing on the incoming HTTP requests. Besides, it's not trivial to write a high performance HTTP cache.

> Besides, it's not trivial to write a high performance HTTP cache.

Certainly true.

I guess that for me "beautiful code" invents some abstractions that transform a problem that initially seems dauntingly difficult into something that is easy to reason about. A proxy cache does not, for me, satisfy the first part of this premise, although I can imagine that the details of such a project take a lot of effort (hence "not trivial", but in a different way).

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

#46

Post by huuu » Sun, Mar 13, 2016, 6:56 PM UTC

For me it's Blender.

  - Starts in a sec.
  - API is the program, the GUI just an interface.
  - Free but very professional
  - Shortcuts are ergonomic.

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

#47

Post by nickpsecurity » Sun, Mar 13, 2016, 7:11 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #40

nickpsecurity wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nice, but they are solving a problem that is not all that hard." Apparently it was hard if it took that long to get a great, clean, FOSS solution to the problem.

Well, in any case, I've never heard of a government software project being overdue because their proxy cache contained spaghetti code :) To be clear, I'm not trying to denigrate this project in any way. I'm just saying that the complexity of the problem should be taken into account here.

The complexity of the problem is significant enough that there's only two verified HTTP servers I recall and a specifying/verifying a web app was considered good work. The bugs, inconsistent perfirmance, and CVE's in various caches also suggests they're not dead simple.

They're certainly easier to write than a lot of software. Their simplicity is deceptive, though, when real-world isdues come into play. Esp if result is to be beautiful.