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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?

#271

Post by kstrauser »

synicalx wrote: post #253
kstrauser wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Siri integration was icing on the cake, as was "Remind me when I talk to...". OF had pretty decent integration, but I couldn't step out of the shower and ask my Homepod what I need to do today.

A shared to-do list with my wife was the real killer feature.

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

#272

Post by wunderlust »

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

I was also going to suggest this, although there are a few things about the UI that I don't love - e.g., it takes 5 'tab' keystrokes to get from a note title to the note body.

On that note (no pun intended), I do wish it was possible to query tag intersections, so to speak. E.g., show notes tagged with both 'todo' & 'coding'.

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

#273

Post by wunderlust »

_virtu wrote: post #129

Ecto the database driver for Phoenix is probably the most amazing piece of software I've used. Elegant dx, performant and just enough of an abstraction on SQL. [1]: https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto

dx == developer experience?

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

#274

Post by heisenzombie »

tigerlily wrote: post #62

SolidWorks 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.

Comsol is a truly inspirational bit of software. Remarkably easy to get started but with a huge breadth and depth of applicability. I wish there were a way it could be made free. Like, I think it might not be a waste of money for a country to buy a country-wide site license for their citizens.

A browse through their application gallery can be pretty interesting:

https://www.comsol.com/models

There's examples of studies into everything from cooking beef in a convection oven, to Bose-Einstein condensates, medical implants, geothermal storage, semiconductor manufacturing, etc, etc.

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

#275

Post by cmeacham98 »

tomc1985 wrote: post #270
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…

There's a series of space strategy/4x/combat sims called X where the latest entry seems to simulate entire economies and individual ships in real time. Dozens of sectors with hundreds of ships and dozens of space stations all humming along at 30-60 FPS. Like Factorio it's incredible and makes me wonder wtf I was doing chaining together bullshit service APIs in my day job.

This game sounds really cool, but I can't find it when I lookup "X game" or "X 4x game". Can you link it to me please?

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

#276

Post by tomc1985 »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #275
tomc1985 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a series of space strategy/4x/combat sims called X where the latest entry seems to simulate entire economies and individual ships in real time. Dozens of sectors with hundreds of ships and dozens of space stations all humming along at 30-60 FPS. Like Factorio it's incredible and makes me wonder wtf I was doing chaining together bullshit service APIs in my day job.

This game sounds really cool, but I can't find it when I lookup "X game" or "X 4x game". Can you link it to me please?

X4 Foundations is its name

https://store.steampowered.com/app/392160/X4_Foundations/

The expansion packs have expanded the size of the game world considerably, making the whole thing even more amazing

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

#280

Post by yen223 »

Centigonal wrote: post #230
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…

I disagree with this. I think the basic concept of Git is beautiful, but the implementation of some of the derivative operations are distinctly inelegant. For example, I hate the use of "ours" and "theirs" in merges and rebases. I understand the theory of why it works the way it does and why it's different when merging versus rebasing, but I just think it's downright confusing, and I still have to double check every…

Something that comes to mind is that Github, as part of a "papercuts" initiative to fix small things, added an arrow that points from the "theirs" branch to the "our" branch in pull requests. That was such a huge improvement for me.
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