Blender.
It's architecture, the window manager/system, the UI, how it is built by and for the users, how the API is integrated and how fast it is compared to other software.
Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
161–170 of 422 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#162Vary 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
curl and wget are fantastic!
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#163Softimage, this is was the first 3D software that I really learned and the UI/UX was way ahead of its time. Macromedia Director, it was amazing how quickly you could create an interactive standalone app or CD-ROM.
Lingo was a lot of fun!
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe I read that Tokio was a "hacky" way to add async to Rust - similar to the solution in the Python space... - is this not the case?
I think this argument refers more to Rust not having built-in support for async from the language’s v1.0 rather than the design of the Tokio stack. That has definitely led to unfortunate incompatibilities between libraries built for the different runtimes. However, the Rust language team took a super methodical approach to async support and the way that more async-related traits are slowly being standardized (first F…
Personally I love being able to experiment on the bleeding edge but waiting for a stable implementation, even if it takes 3 years to reach discussion on the RFC's. There are crates if you need it today, which operate on best-practice, but for an official solution I accept that it may take time for it to achieve acceptable standard library inclusion.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never used those older environments, but I've heard that Windows Forms + C# captures most of the same magic. Do you disagree?
WinForms did, it's extremely similar to Delphi's VCL. Microsoft's even changing newer UI libraries do not.
They stole Delphi's designer from Borland (not sure if it had already renamed or not) and that fixed things for a while. It didn't last though.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#166Peter Norvig's 27 line spell checker https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
This is nice. One interesting choice is the decision to compute the number of observed words, N, as the default value of an optional argument, thereby ensuring that it is only computed once, while still limiting its scope to the function in which it is needed. Perhaps this is a common pattern but it's one I haven't stumbled across before.
The short circuiting `or` chain is also pleasantly virtuosic. Sometimes a little flashiness is tolerable when it works this well!
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#167You might like the book "beautiful code"
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#168SolidWorks Altium Comsol Proprietary yes, but I’ve used all three over the last few years and found them each to be very streamlined, productive, and elegant after a fashion.
The modern Comsol GUI is truly phenomenal, especially considering where it was at with the 3.x versions. It's one of the rare cases, pretty much the only one I can think of in CAD/CAM, where the effort put into a radical GUI redesign really paid off significantly and immediately.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's not `calc.exe`. I think windows doesn't ship with calc.exe anymore. The fair comparison would be the last version of mIRC that was current when the last version of calc.exe was shipped. I don't believe that mIRC would use less RAM than that... Certainly not when you were actually USING it! (including reconfiguring the size of your scrollback, for example..)
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#170Vary 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
> Kitty Could you elaborate on what do you feel is better or makes you more comfortable using kitty against any other random terminal? I also vouch for KDE Connect. Painless to use after installing. Very convinient for file transfer
I love Kitty because it does the things I think are important really well..
It's well-maintained, extremely fast, always responsive, easy to configure, supports ligatures and IBus.