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Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

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

#71

Post by landr0id »

cyphar wrote: post #62
mtrn wrote: post #21

The Go standard library. At least two things coming together: A stripped down language, that explicitly aims to be readable and experienced programmers / authors.

I'm not sure I agree with that. JSON parsing uses panic() and recover() for some logic. And templating is more of a PoC for coroutines in Go than a properly fleshed out library. Not to mention that the AST parsing for Go is horribly designed (though you can do some cool stuff with it).

Even if you don't think the code itself is very nice, the API is pretty well-designed.

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

#72

Post by johan_larson »

percept wrote: post #41

Nobody mentioned git?

I'd be a bit surprised if anyone did. Git is powerful and flexible, but it is also complicated and difficult to use for people who aren't experts.

Beautiful software should make simple things simple, and hard things possible. Git leans strongly toward the latter, to the detriment of the former.

I need version control software that's mostly like a shovel and maybe sometimes like a backhoe. Git is like one of these:

http://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/wp-content/uploads/sit...

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

#73

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

dheera wrote: post #22
yannis wrote: post #13

Knuth's TeX. Set the standards for documentation, reliability, portability, typography, extensibility and scripting, is well into its fourth decade and is free software.

And after those four decades, I still can't figure out how to get my figures to appear where I want them.

The trick is deciding to want them wherever tex puts them.

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

#76

Post by CyberDildonics »

donatj wrote: post #39

"Another World" There's a very interesting write up here: http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/ The game itself has an amazingly beautiful vector style. The engine is remarkably tiny, 20kb. I decided years ago if I ever find time to build a game I'd like to architect it like "Another World".

He wrote tinycc, qemu, a new image compression, AND he can write? Who is this man?

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

#77

Post by inopinatus »

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.

Maybe this will change your opinion. I recalling helping rescue a government software project that was horribly behind schedule. One of the many issues being an e-learning system for a state department of education. Their CMS (Blackboard) was fronted by a forward HTTP proxy/cache/load-balancer that was misbehaving but near-impossible to debug. Details a bit hazy now but I recall it being a hairball of poorly written java. I ripped that out and replaced it with Squid and some rewrite code.

HTTP intermediate services are easy to write, but operate in a hostile and chaotic environment; they are very very hard to make reliable, performant, interoperable, secure, forgiving, and compliant. To achieve that and still have elegant code is really something so yay Varnish.

I'm a bit of a fan of the Dovecot mail server source for similar reasons (but I'm biased, having made a small contribution and got into the authors file)

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

#79

Post by upstandingdude »

phkahler wrote: post #60

SolveSpace - parametric CAD program. Single executable, well done UI, small code base, nice constraint solver, originally by a single person. It's the only OSS CAD I've found useful (QCad was second, then FreeCAD). There are also a few active developers now with major improvements on the way.

Cool! I was looking for a decent free CAD program. Will check it out.
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