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Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#101

Post by tbrock »

C: anything by antirez (redis, etc...) Redis is the epitome of well written understandable C.

Ruby: anything written by _why (if you can find the source) He once gave a whole presentation on the splat operator and it's bizarre uses that gave me goosebumps. A true artist. The code twists and contorts ruby in unimaginable ways.

JS: anything written by TJ hollwaychuck (express, mocha, etc...) Express is so simple but powerful, when you read the source you can't help but wonder where the rest of the code is.

Python: anything written by Kenneth Reitz (Requests, legit, records...) This guy can lay down some serious Python and gets things done. He writes the batteries that python should have had included.

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#103

Post by Biganon »

tbrock wrote: post #101

C: anything by antirez (redis, etc...) Redis is the epitome of well written understandable C. Ruby: anything written by _why (if you can find the source) He once gave a whole presentation on the splat operator and it's bizarre uses that gave me goosebumps. A true artist. The code twists and contorts ruby in unimaginable ways. JS: anything written by TJ hollwaychuck (express, mocha, etc...) Express is so simple but po…

Isn't Flask made by Armin Ronacher?

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#104

Post by tbrock »

Biganon wrote: post #103
tbrock wrote: post #101

C: anything by antirez (redis, etc...) Redis is the epitome of well written understandable C. Ruby: anything written by _why (if you can find the source) He once gave a whole presentation on the splat operator and it's bizarre uses that gave me goosebumps. A true artist. The code twists and contorts ruby in unimaginable ways. JS: anything written by TJ hollwaychuck (express, mocha, etc...) Express is so simple but po…

Isn't Flask made by Armin Ronacher?

Oh right, whatever Kenneth Reitz did then

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#105

Post by agumonkey »

awinter-py wrote: post #56

For me, learning about functional programming and 'feeling my way' into avoiding excess local vars, paying careful attention to side effects. To be clear: I'm talking about functional style in imperative languages, not about making the jump to functional languages (which are still less widely used -- maybe because they're not 'necessary enough'). I'm not saying my code is particularly readable to anyone but me, but f…

And recursive thinking gets your while loop invariants a lot clearer.

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#106

Post by muzani »

JSON.

The way it displays and organizes complex data, better than other standards like CSV or XML. Or the things that use tables.

When I first started programming, I had two favorite ways of storing data - INI and arrays. INI for its elegant key/value style. Arrays were just natural because of the way computers think.

I spent months trying to mold these two things together; how would you actually store key-value things within an array? Do you make an array of pointers that lead to key-value objects? (I used C)

JSON is just this beautiful thing that lets you store data however you want. It's beautiful because it doesn't get in the way. Not only that, but it's a data structure you can understand just by looking at it; you'd have to squint to understand raw XML or a SQL table.

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#109

Post by BigJono »

paulsutter wrote: post #61

The Deepmind Atari Player is only 22KB of source code: https://sites.google.com/a/deepmind.com/dqn/ If you haven't seen the video it's remarkable: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EfGD2qveGdQ

When he says "the algorithm is given just the pixels", does that mean it's not given any information about the game itself, like the objective? How does it know how to measure it's own success?

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

#110

Post by CyberDildonics »

molyss wrote: post #84
CyberDildonics wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wrote tinycc, qemu, a new image compression, AND he can write? Who is this man?

You're mixing him up with Fabrice Bellard, I believe ( http://www.bellard.org/ )

Good catch
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