Unpopular opinion but Microsoft Excel. It's a powerhouse of features.
Perhaps the elegance is more in the concept of the spreadsheet and less in the Excel implementation of the concept.
Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
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Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#32mIRC feels elegant by today's standards.
A full-featured IRC client for Windows that includes an entire scripting language and yet it consumes less RAM than calc.exe.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#33Always impressed with Palantir's software.
Can you give an example? I’ve never seen it myself. What do you find the most impressive about it? Any links where those parts can be seen in action? Also, what would be the closest competitor, and in what regard are they worse?
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#34Keyboard Maestro. It’s a tool for automating common tasks on a Mac. A real programming language is certainly more elegant for writing programs. But what I find elegant about Keyboard Maestro is that it lets me add programming logic to any application on my Mac, quick and dirty.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#35Alfred (Mac launcher)
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#36Redis. The interface is quickly obvious using telnet (which makes all clients pretty obvious). The documentation is both succinct and complete. All operations are listed with their big-O notation.
Any implementation detail you could please share?
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#37Turbo Vision/Turbo Pascal for MS-DOS. Borland put together one of the best instances of an object oriented library that just worked. The follow up with Delphi for Windows was the most productive environment I have ever experienced, until I was priced out of it in their pivot to "Enterprise" customers. Nothing since is anywhere near as productive. Lazarus is ok, but the documentation is horrible, (almost non-existent,…
I never used those older environments, but I've heard that Windows Forms + C# captures most of the same magic. Do you disagree?
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#38emacs, both for the elegance of its elisp-machine design and for how good its self-documentation is.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#39I'm limiting my choices to open source with good explanatory write-ups or presentations.
Graphite for "simple" time series storage:
https://www.aosabook.org/en/graphite.html
HLL datatype (PFCOUNT, PFADD, PFMERGE) in Redis for counting unique items in a set:
Data structures and algorithms that make Lucene & Elasticsearch fast (video):
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#40AWK
Match this, do that.