Turbo Pascal 3 on an IBM 5150. Pick any font color as long as it's green. Editor does automatic indentation and understands arrow keys. Compiler is built in and does one damned job, making EXEs. Runs from a floppy disk and you install it with COPY if you're fancy enough to have a hard drive. The future is wide open.
Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
251–260 of 422 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#252Not 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/
Err, have you played the game? I cant get past 100,000 without the game beginning to slow down. I have a decent computer too.
I was bothered by this problem so I solved it for my own city builder game, Archapolis (still very early development):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q0l87hwmkI
I can path 200,000 to 300,000+ units simultaneously to random destinations, with a bonus of utilizing all shortest paths between two points.
The paths are all cached for constant time path finding, but I figured out how to do so efficiently (both building and storing tree/graph)
I wrote a non-technical article here:
https://www.yesboxstudios.com/2022/04/27/all-nck-shortest-pa...
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love Things, and for a long time used it every day. I just can't get behind their pricing model though, the desktop version in Australia is $80 which is outrageously expensive for a TODO app that can largely be replaced with the slightly inferior but free Reminders app.
That's where I'm at with OmniFocus. I love it so much, but it's really expensive, and I'm finding the extra features above Reminders aren't as crucial to my daily life as I'd thought.
Yep same here, Omni was my next stop after Things and I came to much the same conclusion.
Personally I'm pretty happy with Reminders, being able to shout reminders at Siri, and getting location-based reminders has actually been pretty useful for me especially these days when I don't know when specifically I'll be in the office.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#254I'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.
X11 has been able to do mixed resolution from the beginning.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#255Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#256Lotus Improv.
One of the most beautiful spreadsheet programs ever designed.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#257The three of life is a fantastic design and use of openstreetmap software
https://lifemap.univ-lyon1.fr/explore.html
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#258Unison, the rsync-like tool, has an awesome interface. ( https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ )
Prolog. There's a reason it's been king of the Logical Paradigm for decades.
Oberon OS.
Turing Drawings. ( https://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/ )
procmail ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procmail ) one of the most beautiful (yet hideous) programs I have ever read.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#259I'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.
Perhaps have a look at Pop!OS - still not Wayland but all the good stuff of Ubuntu and none of the snaps.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#260Rollercoaster Tycoon! The game is beautiful, performant, and almost entirely hand-written assembly by one guy. Plus, the parks themselves can look very elegant (kind of like factorio factories). https://www.pcgamesn.com/rollercoaster-tycoon/code-chris-saw...
I still play this game today. I managed to carry along an older version of RCT Deluxe (before it was patched up to defeat all the cheats) for all these years, with the cheat program "beast trainer" (or "cg_beast").