My favorite example of elegant software is the way Spotify organizes playlists and allows for playlist sharing between users. The playlists are very easy to search, browse, and make. They are also easy to share with friends, and you can find an endless number of playlists curated by other users on almost any topic you can imagine!
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?
#362Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#363A lot of nice examples in Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#364Turbo Vision/Turbo Pascal for MS-DOS. Borland put together one of the best instances of an object oriented library that just worked. The follow up with Delphi for Windows was the most productive environment I have ever experienced, until I was priced out of it in their pivot to "Enterprise" customers. Nothing since is anywhere near as productive. Lazarus is ok, but the documentation is horrible, (almost non-existent,…
Related: I did a lot of WinForms programming in C# when I was a tools programmer at EA and I don't know if I've ever been as productive as during that time. The whole API was really well thought out, Visual Studio was fast, C# was a beautiful language.
Every UI technology is unbearably cumbersome after starting my career in WinForms.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#365Git 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 agree that the concept behind git is powerful and elegant. I very much disagree that the implementation of git is elegant. For example: how many things does `git checkout` do? And I still don't understand what the point is of having a staging area. Or why I need to edit files in order to provide Git with instructions on what to do when it rebases. Or why adding hunks is so much more difficult than adding complete f…
> I still don't understand what the point is of having a staging area.
Nor do my coworkers who keep committing whitespace changes and machine-specific configuration changes unrelated to the tasks at hand.
For a more serious answer: I find it extremely useful to be able to control what goes exactly into each commit. Sometimes I refactor more than one part of the code at the same time. If one part passes tests and another one doesn't, I can commit just the one that does. If I spot an issue in one part of the codebase and I add a TODO or FIXME in a comment, or if add some logging, or some other inconsequential change, I can leave them in the working copy for later while still adding "atomic" changes to the repo.
But by far the most use I get out of it is as a last chance of reviewing the code I just wrote, or as a way of checking the results of an automatic merge before the actual merged commit gets written.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#366Since no one seems to have mentioned it yet: D3.js
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#367Signal - The elegance here is the "Privacy-first Design". Every feature and code for Signal messenger is designed on collecting as little (or no) data as possible and it is an essential tool for folks like me who are tired of having tracking and ads nonsense in their most-used apps.
We recently had to do a Signal bot and for an elegant codebase it sure is lacking in terms of libraries. Not to mention the license being as aggressive as possible to prevent any clients of any kind.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#368numpy started a science renaissance. fantastic library for what it does.
The biggest testament to the quality of the numpy API is that it effectively became a standard that's replicated across other libraries like TensorFlow, PyTorch and JAX.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#369The three of life is a fantastic design and use of openstreetmap software https://lifemap.univ-lyon1.fr/explore.html
OpenStreetMap?
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps have a look at Pop!OS - still not Wayland but all the good stuff of Ubuntu and none of the snaps.
No longer a question of elegance, but of practical importance anyway: Will they keep up with maintaing a Firefox package? (Or Chromium if you are so inclined?) And if they do, why could you not use the same on any Ubuntu variant after you remove snap?
They use flatpak (at least I think they do) for firefox. I just use the .deb for chrome.