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

Post by CodesInChaos » Mon, May 02, 2022, 8:45 PM UTC

legalcorrection wrote: post #37

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,…

I never used those older environments, but I've heard that Windows Forms + C# captures most of the same magic. Do you disagree?

Post by dustractor » Mon, May 02, 2022, 8:48 PM UTC

Post by uuyi » Mon, May 02, 2022, 8:50 PM UTC

Stampo00 wrote: post #146

Graphviz. Non-trivial graphs will make it produce hard-to-read output, and you can try fiddling with it forever to get better output. But it's still the first thing I reach for when I have to make a graph.

Post by jrm4 » Mon, May 02, 2022, 8:52 PM UTC

sgtnoodle wrote: post #71

jrm4 wrote: post #65

Syncthing, 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.

I use syncthing and appreciate that it exists. It's way too easy to accidentally all your data, though! I've been dragging my feet migrating a hard drive from my old desktop to my new one for 1.5 years. This past weekend I finally got motivated to power the old one up and wait for syncthing to give positive indication that it's in sync with my server. The reason that was even a concern of mine is that the last time I…

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Mon, May 02, 2022, 8:53 PM UTC

cedws wrote: post #45

Not 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…