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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?

#391

Post by Beltalowda »

usr1106 wrote: post #354
ohiovr wrote: post #160

FFMPEG is an excellent piece of software. I used it last weekend to build an automatic video editor / titler and it only took about 10 hours to make it work. I was going to use moviepy but the rendering time was extreme and the memory consumption was horrible. My 300 line python script with imagemagick and FFMPEG produced a 30 minute long video in under 5 minutes.

Excellent once things work, yes, but elegant? It always takes me hours to search the forums if something doesn't work as expected

ffmpeg is one of those things that has great internals, exposed by a ... daunting ... interface.

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

#392

Post by rad_gruchalski »

hatchnyc wrote: post #299
camelcasing wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any examples?

Mercedes has a system on the S-class that uses the sensors to detect a potential impact (e.g. an rapidly approaching vehicle while the car is stationary) and uses the active suspension to "jump" raising the car a few inches just at the moment of impact, apparently slightly reducing the potential for injury. Many cars and especially planes & spaceships are have tons of systems like this. I worked on a system that did…

> raising the car a few inches just at the moment of impact, apparently slightly reducing the potential for injury

I wonder if the occupants of the other car benefit in any way...

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

#394

Post by hatchnyc »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #392
hatchnyc wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mercedes has a system on the S-class that uses the sensors to detect a potential impact (e.g. an rapidly approaching vehicle while the car is stationary) and uses the active suspension to "jump" raising the car a few inches just at the moment of impact, apparently slightly reducing the potential for injury. Many cars and especially planes & spaceships are have tons of systems like this. I worked on a system that did…

> raising the car a few inches just at the moment of impact, apparently slightly reducing the potential for injury I wonder if the occupants of the other car benefit in any way...

Haha, maybe not? Since their car would tend to go underneath, although the footage I've seen always shows the other vehicle hitting from the side with the hood sliding slightly beneath the Mercedes...it does seem from watching that would give other vehicle slightly more space to dissipate the impact energy.

Now if they had only bought a Mercedes as well, they could have chosen the self-breaking option to avoid the collision in the first place.

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

#395

Post by rad_gruchalski »

hatchnyc wrote: post #394
rad_gruchalski wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> raising the car a few inches just at the moment of impact, apparently slightly reducing the potential for injury I wonder if the occupants of the other car benefit in any way...

Haha, maybe not? Since their car would tend to go underneath, although the footage I've seen always shows the other vehicle hitting from the side with the hood sliding slightly beneath the Mercedes...it does seem from watching that would give other vehicle slightly more space to dissipate the impact energy. Now if they had only bought a Mercedes as well, they could have chosen the self-breaking option to avoid the co…

The old joke about Mercedes cars goes: what car, it rusted away, there’s no car.

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

#396

Post by dpflug »

dcminter wrote: post #127
superasn wrote: post #99

I'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.

You may want to give ARandR a shot: https://christian.amsuess.com/tools/arandr/

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

#397

Post by marssaxman »

jeppester wrote: post #384
Tomis02 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CLI is so confusing that Stackoverflow has a bunch of questions for things that should be easy or trivial by default. Last thing I would call git is "elegant". https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/git?tab=Votes

I knew there would be people commenting on this. But I don't think something has to be intuitive for newcomers to be elegant. There are also posts here mentioning vim, which to most people is weird and useless at first. Some tools takes effort to understand, but once you put in the effort, they become tremendously powerful. I would say that they are elegant in that they allow you to do something otherwise difficult i…

It's not intuitive to newcomers nor to experienced users. Its interface does not make sense; it can only be memorized. The data structure is beautiful; the tool is ugly.

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

#398

Post by anthk »

laserbeam wrote: post #323

Sublime Text introduced multiple cursors to the world. A single incredibly versatile and elegant feature. That feature has empowered my ability to use other pieces of software faster, and programming languages I was unfamiliar with... Better. I've used it to: - batch edit columns copied from excel files. - wget/rename/run cli commands on dozens of inputs without having to worry about how for loops are written in bash…

With a tiny set of AWK yo could do that much faster.

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

#399

Post by anthk »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #89
phoehne wrote: post #41

After 50 years it doesn't seem like it, but C has managed to survive this long because it's a solid all-round player from the bare metal to web servers. It's simple enough that you could probably implement a fairly capable C compiler in assembler.

C has managed to survive this long because of: - Unix and its inertia - Licensing of Unix allowing it to proliferate to the masses and being used for education - because it is simple enough that a compiler can be quickly brought up for any new ISA that appears, as long as it looks enough like a 70's-80's CPU architecture enough for pointers to work. Elegant? No. - Making pointers and arrays synonymous is elegant only…

>- An elegant language makes things like the IOCCC impossible.

Pffffffft... bahahah. No. You can write unreadable turds in ANY language.

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

#400

Post by anthk »

Tao332 wrote: post #313
archielc wrote: post #141

Norton Commander - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander . Not sure how elegant on the inside, but it comes from the era when software development was not so fast paced. And the fact that it inspired so many spin-offs (just to mention few that I personally used: Volkov Commander, Midnight Commander, FAR Manager, and my favourite - DOS Navigator (it had spreadsheet!)).

Pretty much everything I can think of as elegant either runs in the shell (k9s, nano) or is the shell (fish).

MC is unvaluable with directories full of docs.
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