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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?

#122

Post by anthk »

Closi wrote: post #59
jcparkyn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm a definite 'excel-apologist' and think Excel is brilliant and incredibly powerful when used correctly, so the below may be biased but... > Elegant software doesn't normally need an interest group dedicated specifically to preventing people from misusing it. http://www.eusprig.org/ Plenty of the other software listed has user-error misuses (For instance C is listed, and by the same standard it could be considered…

Excel crapped out bioinformatics. It's a turd. Period.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#123

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

sedeki wrote: post #94
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #32

mIRC 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.

Hah, mIRC was a long time ago! I'm a bit nostalgic. :) But is it really true that vanilla mIRC consumes less RAM than calc.exe...? That'd be impressive, if I could believed that!

Just popped open Task Manager...

calculator.exe is at 74 MB working set, 24 MB Memory (private set), 50 MB Memory (shared working set), 48 MB commit size.

mIRC.exe is at 31 MB working set, 13 MB Memory (private set), 18 MB Memory (shared working set), 38 MB commit size.

Doesn't matter which value you use for "How much memory does this program use?". mIRC is smaller in all of them.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#125

Post by paulgb »

I've been pleased by NATS (https://nats.io/). I like how it builds its functionality on layers of abstractions, from the most basic (pub/sub), to request/response on top of that, to key/value and persistent streams on top of that. The CLI is simple to use and you can learn it in an afternoon, but it's robust enough to deploy.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#127

Post by dcminter »

superasn wrote: post #99

I'd say Linux Mint. It combines everything that's good about Ubuntu while removing things like snap. Also the design is so much better but I feel that's a personal choice. But everything in linux just works so well now. I run 4 monitors on 2560 resolution on two separate amd cards and everything runs flawlessly. I have all the software for free and most OSS is just as good if not better for my work (except games and…

Hmm. I was kicking the wheels on cinnamon the other day - but because it's not on Wayland it won't do mixed resolution displays out of the box, so it's not really viable for me.

A pity, as I dislike snaps and the generally dumbed down direction of recent Gnome, so it would otherwise have been a good fit for me. For now I'm (still) on Ubuntu though.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#128

Post by munificent »

mikewarot wrote: post #5

Turbo 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,…

Related: I did a lot of WinForms programming in C# when I was a tools programmer at EA and I don't know if I've ever been as productive as during that time. The whole API was really well thought out, Visual Studio was fast, C# was a beautiful language.
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