After 50 years it doesn't seem like it, but C has managed to survive this long because it's a solid all-round player from the bare metal to web servers. It's simple enough that you could probably implement a fairly capable C compiler in assembler.
Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
41–50 of 422 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#42Most recently Tailscale, I enabled it on NixOS and minutes later had a secure VPN set up.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#43Vim
Adobe Indesign
Monodraw
GNUcash
Django
Beeminder
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#44RabbitMQ. It just works.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#45Not sure if games count as software but if they do - Factorio. I don't play much these days but I'm still utterly stunned how a relatively small, humble team of developers can build something so robust and performant. Granted, I've never really tried pushing the limits, but not once have I felt like the game is even breaking a sweat while processing thousands of machines, belts, and bots. It's a miracle to me.
Their devblogs are really nicely written and you can tell they are extremely passionate about getting things right. In my experience that's a rarity now.
And of course, it's a brilliantly addictive game.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#46Not sure if games count as software but if they do - Factorio. I don't play much these days but I'm still utterly stunned how a relatively small, humble team of developers can build something so robust and performant. Granted, I've never really tried pushing the limits, but not once have I felt like the game is even breaking a sweat while processing thousands of machines, belts, and bots. It's a miracle to me. Their…
great example!
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#47I love utilities that quietly work, and just accept whatever workflow I throw at them. OwnTracks is an app that logs your position and sends it somewhere else. It has been running on my phone for like 2 years without issues, and talks to a server I wrote myself. FolderSync syncs folders on my phone to remote storage. It's super flexible and generally just works. The conditions for syncing are highly configurable. I l…
Maybe https://syncthing.net/ ?
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#48Unpopular 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.
Yes, I think maybe the original VisiCalc was elegant, even if far less featureful. It was a game-changer, one of the first general purpose PC applications that let users do row/column based computing without programming, and along with word processing was the software that underpinned the explosion of PC use in business.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#49Lua
Inheritance through table extensions is truly an elegance in the eye of beholder :-)
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#50Unpopular opinion but Microsoft Excel. It's a powerhouse of features.
Lots of features, sure, but elegant? I've always felt like excel was about as far as you could get from elegant, especially once you want to do anything more than data entry and simple charts. Elegant software doesn't normally need an interest group dedicated specifically to preventing people from misusing it. http://www.eusprig.org/
I recently had to do a bunch of currency conversion for my tax accounting. I had hundreds of transactions, and I needed to set the right exchange rate for each transaction, based on the date of the transaction. This took just a couple of minutes to do in Excel. The solution - a simple Excel formula that compared two rows – was indeed, extremely elegant. Excel enables this type of elegant calculating all the time.