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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?

#241

Post by Thirdegree »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #174
inopinatus wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nice. I'm pretty sure that for any "a government software project being overdue because X", there is such an X... and someone on HN was there.

The government should stop hiring HN programmers, that's clearly the problem!

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

#243

Post by enneff »

cyphar wrote: post #214
enneff wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. Right, but why can't I call define custom operators? And why is there no bracketing in conditionals? It just feels clunky to me (but maybe I'm too spoiled with Jin…

> I still feel like you could allow execution of functions passed in the data argument

I don't recally anyone asking for this before. File an issue? https://golang.org/issue/new

> It's stuff like that which makes me feel like it was a PoC (or at least, not designed to be feature-complete).

It's designed to be a useful template engine. I don't know about "feature complete", but we are still improving it. If you find it lacking then please file issues so that we can think about improving it.

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

#244

Post by eru »

pjc50 wrote: post #220
eru wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does "beautiful" means "the software can be twisted in lots of interesting ways"? If so, dynamic language interpreters are "beautiful", while static language compilers are "ugly". You'd be surprised what people do to static language compilers. C++'s template are turing complete, after all.

Templates can achieve "towering soviet concrete brutalist monument to ugliness" levels of ugly.

Yes. I mentioned C++ templates, because I don't want to only talk about Haskell. (People make ghc do interesting things, too. And some of them are even not-so-ugly.)

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

#245

Post by dschiptsov »

prospero wrote: post #228
dschiptsov wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Always be composing" the ideas were stolen from the Wizards talk http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

I wasn't aware of this talk, so I'm not sure how I could have stolen anything from it. Cool link, though, thanks.

I should have used quotes.

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

#246

Post by muzani »

Ace17 wrote: post #190

I'm seeing a lot of meanings to "beautiful" here, please, let's define what we're talking about. Does "beautiful" means "the code is clean"? If so, the Quake source code is "beautiful", while Duke3D Build engine is "ugly". Does "beaufitul" means "the code is clever"? If so, gcc, ffmpeg and ODE are "beautiful", and Google's Ninja is "tasteless". Does "beautiful" means "the code is modular" (I mean "open-closed" here)?…

I would define it as something that evokes emotion and admiration.

It can be something that makes you calm, angry, disgusted. The more so, the better. Javascript and Windows are great examples of this.

Almost always you'd sit there and wonder why anyone would go to the lengths to build this. Lengths can mean that they went to the effort of simplifying a complicated thing or even making a complicated thing absurdly complicated.

E.g. I see beauty in the Sydney Opera House, not only because of its form, but because they managed to build a grand opera house in one of the least culturally sophisticated cities in the world. There's just something completely out of place about the Sydney Opera House and that's what makes it so beautiful. Most people think the characteristic roof symbolizes sails, but it's actually an orange peel. It's like a clever prank.

When you go back to the Hackers and Painters essay - PG tries to associate the two together. Beautiful hacks are like shortcuts that work. Almost always a great hack does something dumb, but is very effective.

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

#248

Post by iurisilvio »

tbrock wrote: post #101

C: anything by antirez (redis, etc...) Redis is the epitome of well written understandable C. Ruby: anything written by _why (if you can find the source) He once gave a whole presentation on the splat operator and it's bizarre uses that gave me goosebumps. A true artist. The code twists and contorts ruby in unimaginable ways. JS: anything written by TJ hollwaychuck (express, mocha, etc...) Express is so simple but po…

Python: anything written by Kenneth Reitz or Armin Ronacher. You probably already used something from them.

Beautiful APIs and clean code. It is easy to contribute to their projects.

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

#249

Post by foota »

collyw wrote: post #242
foota wrote: post #131

I'm a big fan of SqlAlchemy for python.

Curious why this got downvoted. I have never looked at the source code, but I often hear that its a very well engineered library.

You and me both :) I almost asked people why.

I think part of it has to do with the fact that sqlalchemy isn't by any means a small library and has a lot of elbow grease put into it.

It isn't some ornate stained glass window, it's bullet proof glass.

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

#250

Post by azaras »

oluckyman wrote: post #152
tbrock wrote: post #101

C: anything by antirez (redis, etc...) Redis is the epitome of well written understandable C. Ruby: anything written by _why (if you can find the source) He once gave a whole presentation on the splat operator and it's bizarre uses that gave me goosebumps. A true artist. The code twists and contorts ruby in unimaginable ways. JS: anything written by TJ hollwaychuck (express, mocha, etc...) Express is so simple but po…

"The code twists and contorts ruby in unimaginable ways." Doesn't sound like my idea of beautiful software.

This is awful code for Python but beautiful for Ruby. Python is "simplicity" and Ruby is "clever".
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