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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?

#241

Post by noizejoy »

throwawayboise wrote: post #48
tinus_hn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the elegance is more in the concept of the spreadsheet and less in the Excel implementation of the concept.

Yes, I think maybe the original VisiCalc was elegant, even if far less featureful. It was a game-changer, one of the first general purpose PC applications that let users do row/column based computing without programming, and along with word processing was the software that underpinned the explosion of PC use in business.

I taught Lotus 1-2-3 for a while, so probably had well above average familiarity with it.

And then in 1987, I opened Excel 1.0 on a Mac SE for the first time. Was blown away at how elegant that felt. Later versions seemed to loose that original elegance as features were added.

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

#243

Post by wildrhythms »

jjice wrote: post #140

I guess my definition of elegant would be software that has fantastic UX and just works and works so well it boggles my mind how well it works. I'd also extended that to include a foundational core that all other parts can be built off of. In that case, I'd go with vim. I'm not even a huge Vim guy (use it for notes and remote stuff, but not my primary editor), but the concepts are simple and oh so powerful. It's just…

Yes!! Learning Vim was a revolution for me. It eliminated the strain and repetitive movement of constantly turning to the mouse or arrow keys to navigate the cursor around. Just learning how to jump between INSERT and VISUAL mode and move the cursor was enough to hook me. Now I use nvim + COC for Intellisense-style completion and it's a joy. I love using this software!

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

#246

Post by noizejoy »

pddpro wrote: post #212

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

Insanely powerful and useful - very much so. And immeasurable impact on the entire media software and soundware landscape. It’s probably amongst my subjective top 10 list of software.

But I’ve never considered it elegant.

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

#247

Post by jjnoakes »

whoibrar wrote: post #78

Standard Notes. Simple. Free. Open Source. E2E encryption. Basically, No frills. Their idea is to make software not with most features but the one that stays until the next century. They have a great blog on this philosophy. https://standardnotes.com/longevity

Man, I've looked at Standard Notes and want to love it and switch everything over to it. This is the only thing holding me back is the lack of background sync on mobile: https://github.com/standardnotes/mobile/issues/45

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

#249

Post by uhoh-itsmaciek »

Sequel [1], the Ruby ORM. It's rock-solid, provides similar abstractions to Active Record but feels much better thought out, and it has great docs.

Also, at any point in time, it's likely to have zero open issues and zero open pull requests, which is pretty impressive for a project of its size.

[1]: https://github.com/jeremyevans/sequel

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

#250

Post by gitgud »

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…

Another elegant game is [1] City Skylines. It's amazing how they can create such a huge virtual world with millions of simulated individuals that roam around and have complex lives in your city.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/255710/Cities_Skylines/

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