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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?

#132

Post by foobarian »

mtrn wrote: post #58
ycmbntrthrwaway wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related: - Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than: http://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html - A Personal History of Compilation Speed, Part 2: http://prog21.dadgum.com/47.html

Turbo Pascal 5 got me into programming. I wish people would build smaller things again.

My personal favorite thing about TP:

  begin
    asm
      mov ax, 10h
      ...

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

#133

Post by ktRolster »

stray wrote: post #122
muzani wrote: post #106

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 thin…

> JSON is just this beautiful thing that lets you store data however you want. What if I want to store integers? Not floats. Integers.

Store it as a string and write your own math routines.

I don't know why you guys are having trouble with this. \s

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

#134

Post by ktRolster »

Early MacPaint and Quickdraw source code is worth a look. Clean and simple, yet solved a rather complex problem. http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw-...

Here is what the author said about it (and code in general):

"It’s an art form, like any other art form… I would spend time rewriting whole sections of code to make them more cleanly organized, more clear. I’m a firm believer that the best way to prevent bugs is to make it so that you can read through the code and understand exactly what it’s doing"

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

#137

Post by CephalopodMD »

CoryG89 wrote: post #100

I would say that not many actual implementations of software turn out to be beautiful, assuming it is above a certain threshold of complexity and it is meant for production use. On the other hand, the ideas, algorithms, or the protocols on which software is based often seem beautiful, elegant, or brilliant, at least to me. A few examples I can think of are: Google PageRank algorithm, Bitcoin's protocol and the block…

> tcp protocol

I respectfully disagree. Many of the elements of tcp are very complicated, and more or less of a hack. Compose them all together, and it's a hugely complex and arguably ugly (if utilitarian) standard.

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

#138

Post by analog31 »

foobarian wrote: post #132
mtrn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turbo Pascal 5 got me into programming. I wish people would build smaller things again.

My personal favorite thing about TP: begin asm mov ax, 10h ...

I didn't go quite that far, but I did some insane stuff using the built-in i/o port access and the parallel printer port.
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