4.3BSD Unix. Arguably, the first modern operating system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Berkeley_Softwa...
Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
111–120 of 422 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#112Microware OS-9. A Unix-like (..sort of) operating system that supported multitasking, multiuser operation on an 8 bit CPU with 64kb or less of memory back in 1979.. two years before IBM bought a CPM clone and called it DOS.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#113WireGuard
Yeah, it's definitely up there: it's one of these solutions, when you see it, you wonder how everyone could get it so wrong before it came around.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#114Vary random but these are stuff which impressed me on first try and never let me down:
Kitty, the terminal emulator by Kovid Goyal
wouter, a minimal JS routing library
espanso, a text expansion program
KDE Connect
Tailscale
The last 2 together
curl
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#115Syncthing, by a mile. As someone who very much enjoys tinkering with Linux and such, but also likes trying to onboard other people who aren't as techy, Syncthing is such a killer example. It's almost depressing because I want other free and open source stuff to be this good, though I know the economics (and proprietary interference, perhaps?) make that tough.
The last time I used syncthing to sync files from my android phones to my Linux server, it always somehow got stuck and never recovered. The phone app would stop running in the background and I would forget to rerun it and if it was started a long time later it would get stuck and would not recover automatically. Eventually, just stopped using it. Now I use Google photos and it works great to backup my family's phones' photos.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#116The original MapReduce implementation by Jeff Dean and friends is probably up there for me. Couple of hundred lines of code doing bunch of task distribution on a very large scale is just very impressive.
Of course the current/latest version of it has took a life of its own in size and complexity (but of course with performance and reliability too) but the initial version still shines through!
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#117Not 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…
Similarly, mindustry is written in java by a single developer freshly out of college and is incredibly performant for the amount of moving pieces rendered at a time. Granted I'm not in video games, maybe it's not too hard, but I thought it was really cool.
It's also an incredibly cool, interesting game design. If you like Factorio + Tower Defense you should check it out.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#118- TCL/TK
- CWM
- Music On Console
- Sfeed+sfeed_curses+xargs+wget+MOC
- Entr
- Mit-Scheme + Edwin + SICP. It doubles as an IMAP client. Use Stunnel for TLS.
- UDFClient
- NNCP
- S-Nail. It can be easier than Mutt.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#119The things app https://culturedcode.com/things/ , even though it's just an elegant TODO app something drove me to buy the iPhone and Mac versions.
Some time ago I spent a good amount of time looking for a development stack that allowed me to just build stuff. I ended up trying and deciding on Laravel Jetstream with InertiaJS https://jetstream.laravel.com/2.x/stacks/inertia.html. Laravel was easy enough already to just pick and do things, now this solves the backend+frontend projects for me by allowing me to just put vuejs components on top of my laravel app and jetbrains already comes with Auth stuff setup solved.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#120TeXmacs (www.texmacs.org), which is a finely crafted document preparation system realizing at the same time both the structured and the WYSIWYG paradigms. It is vastly superior to all other document preparation systems. In particular it is superior to both TeX (in all its variants) and to Word, under all respects: conceptually, in the power that it affords in manipulating documents, in the ease with which it makes it…
Also TeXmacs can work with Maxima inside your document.