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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?

#91

Post by agumonkey »

huuu wrote: post #46

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.

Reminds me of Maya. I had to sit down for a minute when I realize 90% of the UI is a mel Script. The core of the software is an interpreter/server for some lazy DAG. Actually I wanted to mention Maya, from its performance on piss poor[1] desktop hardware of the late 90s it was able to pull real time Rigid Body dynamics over Nurbs surface (and even pseudo Non Rigid) while staying responsive.

[1] Pentium 2 350 with a NV3 ~gpu.

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

#92

Post by wstrange »

ZFS

The idea of collapsing a volume manager and file system into one was very innovative and led to substantially more functionality with less code (although some called it a "rampant layering violation" ).

ZFS is a joy to use, dead simple, and arguably the most robust file system out there.

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

#94

Post by vmorgulis »

Oberon, TempleOS or OpenGenera. These projects are vertical, consistent and use only one programming language.

In OpenGenera, everything displayed on the screen is typed and can be retrieved as an s-expression (like in a web browser):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk

https://github.com/ynniv/opengenera#additional-reading

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

#95

Post by agumonkey »

wstrange wrote: post #92

ZFS The idea of collapsing a volume manager and file system into one was very innovative and led to substantially more functionality with less code (although some called it a "rampant layering violation" ). ZFS is a joy to use, dead simple, and arguably the most robust file system out there.

The source code is pretty neat too. At least at FreeBSD 9.2.

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

#96

Post by rwallace »

The Scheme programming language. As close to the core essence of programming as an actually usable, practical programming language has ever come.

LLVM. Being able to fully represent general code in a simple, well-defined, readable text-based format is a far bigger achievement than you would think until you look at what it took to do it.

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

#97

Post by enneff »

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).

> And templating is more of a PoC for coroutines in Go than a properly fleshed out library.

I worked with Rob on that library and that's really not the case. It was designed from the ground up to replace the existing template library which was bad in several ways. The parser (which is I think what you refer to) is just an implementation detail.

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

#98

Post by enneff »

mtrn wrote: post #58
ycmbntrthrwaway wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related: - Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than: http://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html - A Personal History of Compilation Speed, Part 2: http://prog21.dadgum.com/47.html

Turbo Pascal 5 got me into programming. I wish people would build smaller things again.

I also learned to properly program using Turbo Pascal. You might enjoy Go. I find its small language, library, and tools that I can keep in my head leave me feeling similar to how I felt using Turbo Pascal back in the day.

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

#100

Post by CoryG89 »

I would say that not many actual implementations of software turn out to be beautiful, assuming it is above a certain threshold of complexity and it is meant for production use.

On the other hand, the ideas, algorithms, or the protocols on which software is based often seem beautiful, elegant, or brilliant, at least to me.

A few examples I can think of are: Google PageRank algorithm, Bitcoin's protocol and the block chain, the TCP network protocol, the BitTorrent protocol, Dijkstra’s algorithm, etc.

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