Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software? • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by ThunderSizzle » Mon, May 02, 2022, 10:52 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…

I'll also point out that the UI for Factorio is almost among the best.

I'd prefer a factorio over almost another UI.

I'm imagining a port of factorio's UI into most strategy games would be very nice, both from a VERY zoomable map, a clear research/progression tree. A few improvements could be made IMHO, but it's lighyears better than TF, CS, the Chris Sawyer set, etc.

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

#212

Post by pddpro » Mon, May 02, 2022, 10:53 PM UTC

I'm not sure if this has come before but for me it'd be ffmpeg. The things it can do!

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

#213

Post by endgame » Mon, May 02, 2022, 10:54 PM UTC

m-p-3 wrote: post #23

SQLite. It's a damn fine piece of software for small applications.

I've heard people call it "a replacement for `fopen()`". Similarly, I like ZeroMQ as a replacement for sockets.

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

#214

Post by rob74 » Mon, May 02, 2022, 11:03 PM UTC

jeppester wrote: post #184

Git is the first example that comes to my mind. I'm aware that the concept can be difficult to grasp and that the cli commands seem weird at first. Once it clicks however, it's an absolutely fantastic tool. I'm still often amazed by what is possible with selective resets, diffs, greps, and most impressively interactive rebases. It makes a lot of otherwise difficult tasks much easier, and more elegant. Git is IMO one…

Not sure about that - yeah, git is a powerful tool, but I can't help thinking that lots of things could have been done in a more straightforward and less confusing way. Such as the "double responsibility" of "git checkout" which has recently been split into "git switch" (for switching branches) and "git restore" (for reverting files).

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

#215

Post by massprogrammer » Mon, May 02, 2022, 11:04 PM UTC

This is interesting question, several times I complemented Telegram in front of friends

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

#216

Post by jpeter » Mon, May 02, 2022, 11:04 PM UTC

kjeetgill wrote: post #117

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…

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.

Factorio is able to handle insane base sizes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QjAhxxKWIk

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

#217

Post by libraryatnight » Mon, May 02, 2022, 11:07 PM UTC

Obsidian.md - the markdown note taking app. I find it intuitive and powerful.

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

#218

Post by tnorthcutt » Mon, May 02, 2022, 11:07 PM UTC

iwebdevfromhome wrote: post #119

The 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 ju…

> jetbrains already comes with Auth stuff setup solved

What do you mean by this? Perhaps that's a typo and you mean Jetstream?

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

#219

Post by jawarner » Mon, May 02, 2022, 11:08 PM UTC

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #211

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…

I'll also point out that the UI for Factorio is almost among the best. I'd prefer a factorio over almost another UI. I'm imagining a port of factorio's UI into most strategy games would be very nice, both from a VERY zoomable map, a clear research/progression tree. A few improvements could be made IMHO, but it's lighyears better than TF, CS, the Chris Sawyer set, etc.

What are TF and CS?

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

#220

Post by sitkack » Mon, May 02, 2022, 11:08 PM UTC

m-p-3 wrote: post #23

SQLite. It's a damn fine piece of software for small applications.

I just loaded 4.6G of json into an in-memory sqlite database in about 20 lines of Python. It isn't just for data storage, it is also great for quick adhoc analysis.