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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?

#201

Post by Aardwolf »

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…

I've definitely pushed the limits of performance with way too upgraded huge range artillery turrets hitting all the biter bases, but yes, very performant with large factories otherwise :)

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

#202

Post by smm11 »

Circus Ponies Notebook (On OpenStep, then OS X), made my jaw literally hit the floor when I first saw it. I didn't just think all software had something to learn here, I thought this was the only software anyone would ever need.

To be fair, my job lend itself toward this at the time, the WWW was nowhere near what it was a few years later, and everything-tied-to-everything was miles away. But this blew my mind.

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

#203

Post by munificent »

gwbas1c wrote: post #174
munificent wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> C# was a beautiful language It still is. (And Blazor is pretty cool, too.)

Yes, definitely! I put it in the past tense only because I don't use it these days.

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

#205

Post by joshbochu »

gordon_freeman wrote: post #101

Signal - 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.

yes!

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

#208

Post by pcurve »

leobg wrote: post #33
pcurve wrote: post #8

Always impressed with Palantir's software.

Can you give an example? I’ve never seen it myself. What do you find the most impressive about it? Any links where those parts can be seen in action? Also, what would be the closest competitor, and in what regard are they worse?

I figured I'd get some downvotes mentioning PLTR here. ;-)

GPalantir is definitely being more open with their demo now, so there are some good ones on their youtube channel.

You can skim through.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF-GSj-Exms

I'm impressed by how polished everything looks. As a person who does UX / product design, their working software looks better than most designer's portfolio mockups.

I'm impressed by how fast and snappy everything works or feels.

I'm impressed by how rich and custom tailored their UI component library is.

I'm impressed by how focused and tailored their UI for job at hand.

I'm impressed by how every single page in their application looks beautiful, not just a handful.

They actually have all their React UI library published as opensource here. https://blueprintjs.com/

If there's anyone from pltr reading this, good job. Your design people are amazing.

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

#209

Post by layer8 »

daveloyall wrote: post #169
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just popped open Task Manager... calculator.exe is at 74 MB working set, 24 MB Memory (private set), 50 MB Memory (shared working set), 48 MB commit size. mIRC.exe is at 31 MB working set, 13 MB Memory (private set), 18 MB Memory (shared working set), 38 MB commit size. Doesn't matter which value you use for "How much memory does this program use?". mIRC is smaller in all of them.

That's not `calc.exe`. I think windows doesn't ship with calc.exe anymore. The fair comparison would be the last version of mIRC that was current when the last version of calc.exe was shipped. I don't believe that mIRC would use less RAM than that... Certainly not when you were actually USING it! (including reconfiguring the size of your scrollback, for example..)

You can still get it from https://win7games.com/#calc (via WinAero).
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