Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11278065

by ponderatul • 10 years ago

345 258 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

So I've been reading Paul Graham's - Hackers and Painters. A bit late, I know. And I find his ideas fascinating. One that struck a chord with me, was the idea of taste, recognising good taste. I'd like to know examples of beautiful software and what makes it beautiful.

w8rbt• 10 years ago

Personally, I like Tarsnap and anything from the OpenBSD project. Of course, this is highly subjective, and I would not call the code 'beautiful'. However, to me, these are a few examples of code performing complex tasks written in a simple, straight-forward way that I can follow and understand.

cperciva• 10 years ago

If you like the Tarsnap code, you should read the spiped code. Tarsnap is made ugly in places by needing to work with/around the original tar code it's based on; spiped is code entirely written by me.

stray2• 10 years ago

The most beautiful I'm aware of is Robert Strandh's SICL (https://github.com/robert-strandh/SICL). CL-PPCRE (https://github.com/edicl/cl-ppcre) is very nice as well, imo.

What makes them beautiful? They're very straight forward and clearly communicate what they're doing, and how.

And the parentheses in their language of choice softens the visual display of the code -- while the semantics of the language cause the shape of the code to communicate quite a bit about how the machine will go about executing it.

There are no surprises.

In terms of conceptual beauty, it'd be hard to beat Screamer (https://github.com/nikodemus/screamer).

What makes this beautiful? The way it makes a hairy problem seem simple and straight-forward.

agumonkey9• 10 years ago

Note SICL is used in CLASP https://github.com/drmeister/clasp (according to CLASP author's talk somewhere)

zem2• 10 years ago

wow, sicl really is a beautiful project. thanks for the pointer.

spotman• 10 years ago

Redis is my favorite example. It's some of the easiest to read, digest, and modify source code out there.

percept2• 10 years ago

antirez as Italian Renaissance code painter?

eternalban• 10 years ago

Beautiful software =/= beautiful code.

Beautiful software: Java Virtual Machine (the code? could be entirely un-beautiful ;)

sklogic3• 10 years ago

I'm genuinely puzzled. What can be beautiful anywhere in the JVM?!?

_pmf_• 10 years ago

Hot loop replacement? Dynamic devirtualization and revirtualization?

daveguy• 10 years ago

It's enterprise beautiful.

kpil3• 10 years ago

It's a really clean abstraction of a computing environment, which is as well defined and predicatable that is possible.

I tend to prefer that to performance cludges, arcane architectural hand waving, and undefined behaviour.

Some people thinks it's useless, since they do no see the benefits, as there are costs.

(There are some obvious UX-flaws, especially on the desktop, where it takes a bit to start up, and clearly failes to define a jxe file-extension for executable jars... Not to mention all the enterprise-level shit that goes on...)

malux85• 10 years ago

In terms of source code? If so my favourites to read are: LLVM and Clang. Redis. TensorFlow. Doom. Sha256k (the one Bitcoin core uses).

julie1• 10 years ago

Drivers.

The interface between the physical world and the digital world. They are the lenses of computers as much as its magic.

cyphar4• 10 years ago

The code for most drivers however, is less than beautiful. And I'd argue that it's controller firmware that is the "real" bridge between the analogue and digital.

xkarga00• 10 years ago

All of the btcsuite code (btcd, btcwallet, ...)

hebdo• 10 years ago

Varnish cache.

1) Configured via a special DSL (Varnish Configuration language) that gets translated into C, compiled and loaded into the Varnish process via a .so. Perfect combination of expressiveness and speed. You can even inline raw C code in it!

2) Heavy, good use of virtual memory. Varnish allocates quite a lot of gigabytes and leaves it up to the operating system to decide what should be in RAM and what should be on disk.

3) LRU garbage collection of cached objects requires a synchronized priority queue. Varnish people transformed the decades old idea of implementing a heap in an array that every CS graduate knows and came up with a faster, paging-aware solution (http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327).

amelius3• 10 years ago

Nice, but they are solving a problem that is not all that hard. For example, I'd rather see a beautiful implementation of a concurrent garbage collector (which probably doesn't exist because it is almost impossible to achieve; a purely functional programming approach doesn't even apply here). Or how about a beautiful implementation of a web browser?

nickpsecurity2• 10 years ago

"Nice, but they are solving a problem that is not all that hard."

Apparently it was hard if it took that long to get a great, clean, FOSS solution to the problem.

imtringued• 10 years ago

Concurrent garbage collectors exist. It's nothing new or special. The problem is you need read barriers which means your garbage collector ends up slowing your entire programm significantly down. For some reason Intel and AMD decided it's not worth it to add hardware acceleration for read and write barriers so end up paying a lot of $ for custom designed processors from Azul if you truly need a concurrent garbage collector.

http://www.azulsystems.com/products/vega/processor

zengr• 10 years ago

Surprised that no one mentioned elasticsearch here. The Java code is truly one of the best I have seen in any large open source Java project.

bpchaps• 10 years ago

Maybe they should put that effort into their documentation ;)

binarymax• 10 years ago

There is a really good list covered in detail here:

http://www.aosabook.org/en/index.html

yannis2• 10 years ago

Knuth's TeX. Set the standards for documentation, reliability, portability, typography, extensibility and scripting, is well into its fourth decade and is free software.

dheera• 10 years ago

And after those four decades, I still can't figure out how to get my figures to appear where I want them.

yannis2• 10 years ago

Get some help http://tex.stackexchange.com waiting for four decades to get your figures to appear where you want them is too long...

GFK_of_xmaspast• 10 years ago

The trick is deciding to want them wherever tex puts them.

j-pb• 10 years ago

Yeah, but no.

Making a document description language purposefully turing complete is an offence that should be punishable by lashes with a fiberoptic cable.

decaffito• 10 years ago

daisydisk. oh it's smooth, harmonious colours, quintessential

edit: other comments seem to be from a source code perspective ?

albertzeyer• 10 years ago

I really like reading most code from John Carmack, e.g. Quake 1-3. Much of it can be seen here: https://github.com/id-Software

jamescun• 10 years ago

Say what you like about Rails (or Ruby for that matter), but go and look at its source. It is well laid out, the commenting is extensive and descriptive, and it follows a natural flow.

The same can be said of the PostgreSQL source.

hendekagon• 10 years ago

If you mean applications, Adobe Illustrator

If you mean code, Smalltalk or LISP

sctb• 10 years ago

Arthur Whitney's one-page interpreter: http://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum

agumonkey9• 10 years ago

unicorns level in ioccc standards

mtrn3• 10 years ago

The Go standard library. At least two things coming together: A stripped down language, that explicitly aims to be readable and experienced programmers / authors.

cyphar4• 10 years ago

I'm not sure I agree with that. JSON parsing uses panic() and recover() for some logic. And templating is more of a PoC for coroutines in Go than a properly fleshed out library. Not to mention that the AST parsing for Go is horribly designed (though you can do some cool stuff with it).

mtrn3• 10 years ago

I guess, the library authors needed to learn Go themselves as they build up the stdlib.

landr0id• 10 years ago

Even if you don't think the code itself is very nice, the API is pretty well-designed.

enneff3• 10 years ago

And templating is more of a PoC for coroutines in Go than a properly fleshed out library.

I worked with Rob on that library and that's really not the case. It was designed from the ground up to replace the existing template library which was bad in several ways. The parser (which is I think what you refer to) is just an implementation detail.

nemo1618• 10 years ago

Seconded. I'm not sure if this is common for other languages, but I use the Go stdlib as a reference for what good Go code should look like. And reading it often reveals little language tricks that I wasn't aware of.

Example: The Sum method of the hash.Hash interface takes a byte slice as an argument, and appends the hash to it. Why not take zero arguments and simply return a new slice? Because the authors recognized that if you're doing hashing, you probably care about performance. Appending to a supplied slice allows you to save an allocation.

The stdlib is full of little details like that, and it adds up to a really great programming experience. Go may be lacking in some respects, but it has Good Design stamped all over it.

PeCaN4• 10 years ago

LuaJIT. It's a cutting-edge JIT with remarkably understandable algorithms and source. Every single piece of it is well thought out. Even the asm interpreters are pretty clean and explain why they work the way they do.

Mike Pall is a demigod.

chadcmulligan• 10 years ago

the lua vm to, the code is so small but works so well.

jballanc2• 10 years ago

LuaJIT is, indeed, a genius masterwork, but it's also very intricate and complex. I'm not entirely sure anyone other than Mike Pall could understand it completely.

On the other hand Lua (The Original™) is also a beautiful bit of programming, and much more approachable. If you've ever wondered what it means when people talk about "Stack-based VMs", reading through the Lua source is an excellent way to learn more.

PeCaN4• 10 years ago

But... Lua is a register-based VM since like Lua 5.

Not disputing that Rio Lua is also an excellent work though. Lua 5.1 only has 38 opcodes total. A complete description of how the VM works fits on a page or so.

superuser2• 10 years ago

Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but from the UX side, Square Cash.

Does one thing, does it well with large responsive colorful UI that still displays everything you need to know. Is minimally invasive (debit card instead of bank account verification). Uses your existing contacts, so everything "just works" by default.

ponderatul3• 10 years ago

Not looking for anything specifically, I'm just a junior developer and mostly in javascript. I'm just looking for traits, common elements or approaches to beautiful software. So thank you for sharing :D.

sklogic3• 10 years ago

TeX and Metafont. It'd be hard to find anything even matching these gems.

seivan• 10 years ago

Grand central dispatch is so beautifully designed. Both its API and just general use. It clicked with me the first time it got introduced and I abandoned bothering with NSOperarion

elsurudo• 10 years ago

I like NSOperation. Basically because I find it nice to encapsulate tasks that are to run in another thread in their own class. Not always, of course, but if they are "long enough", I think they should stand on their own.

fufefderddfr2• 10 years ago

It's funny to read what people think are beautiful apps here.

IMHO, the most beautiful software are always games and entertainment titles... After all that is the purpose.

Office 2013? It's very useful! I use a classic menu template and got rid of the ribbon, since the functionality is the same, but in my preferred format. Beauty does not come into play with office...

I can use it for creating beautiful PowerPoint and excel spreadsheets.

Code is never 'beautiful'. It's either concise, well-written and formatted well, or it isn't.

fufefderddfr2• 10 years ago

I've evaluated what I have used over the years...

POSER 4 seems like the most beautiful app.

klibertp2• 10 years ago

Code is never 'beautiful'. It's either concise, well-written and formatted well, or it isn't.

This is not true. You may not value beauty as a characteristic of code, but there are people who do.

Also, you could say the same thing about novels. "concise, well-written and formatted well" are features of most published novels; does it mean they all are the same in terms of beauty?

Beauty is inherently subjective and relative. Personally, I find the code which form and function fit together pretty. It's the same kind of beauty I feel when reading poems. You're free to ignore such things, of course, but saying that the code can never be pretty is actually quite a bit rude to some people.

V-2• 10 years ago

In my opinion it depends on the type of code. It's unlikely to find beauty in a run-of-the-mill CRUD app; it can be nice and neat at best. Beautiful code is possible when there's creativity involved - there should be some conceptual originality to the code in question. Of course it's not physically impossible to bury some brilliancy in a bank transaction processing script, it's just a less probable place to find one.

apdar• 10 years ago

Beautiful code: graph search in prolog. So much in as few lines as possible[1]

[1] http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~billw/cs9414/notes/prolog/path-t...

analog312• 10 years ago

Turbo Pascal for DOS. Simple, compact, quick, well documented, reasonably easy to learn, and not too expensive.

I think that bloat is the enemy of beauty, so we're probably likely to find beauty in software that does a few things well.

ycmbntrthrwaway6• 10 years ago

- 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

mtrn3• 10 years ago

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

jaybosamiya• 10 years ago

Not specifically "software" but this piece of Haskell code is the most beautiful code I've ever seen:

    quicksort [] = []
    quicksort (x:xs) = quicksort [y|y<-xs,y<x] ++ [x] ++ quicksort [y|y<-xs,y>=x]

cyphar4• 10 years ago

The recursive Fibonacci definition in Haskell is far more beautiful IMO. But there's always more beautiful one-line snippets (like the regex that can tell you if a number is prime).

fibs = 0 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibs (tail fibs)

CyberDildonics3• 10 years ago

Will you still think that when you realize it isn't actually a quicksort?

eru3• 10 years ago

It's tree sort. It does the same comparisons as quicksort, but organizes its data differently.

It's nifty, but not an especially beautiful use of Haskell.

Okasaki's Red-Black Trees rendered in Haskell are nicer, for example.

sahreeg• 10 years ago

This Beauty! I mean that in terms of code aesthetics. http://www.ioccc.org/2011/eastman/eastman.c

(winner of the 20th International Obfuscated C Code Contest)

Nevertheless once you run it, you will have a sweet surprise.

sam_lowry_• 10 years ago

Check for the Beautiful Code book. It has some examples in it.

eliboy• 10 years ago

The way ruby uses instance_eval. I didn't pay attention at first, I just enjoyed the beautiful interfaces. But when I saw how they use instance_eval behind the scene and how simple is, I was in awe.

Luc• 10 years ago

Doom.

At the time I had never heard of Binary Space Partition Trees. Beautiful concept for a monument of a game.

http://fabiensanglard.net/doomIphone/doomClassicRenderer.php

dmytroi• 10 years ago

FMOD [1] sound framework provides one of the best C API's in industry : stable, works everywhere, clean and beautiful. Please find API example at [2].

[1] http://www.fmod.org/ [2]: https://github.com/fmod/ue4integration/blob/master/FMODStudi...

donatj• 10 years ago

"Another World" There's a very interesting write up here: http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/

The game itself has an amazingly beautiful vector style. The engine is remarkably tiny, 20kb. I decided years ago if I ever find time to build a game I'd like to architect it like "Another World".

CyberDildonics3• 10 years ago

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

paxswill• 10 years ago

I think you're confusing Fabien Sanglard (writer of the above article) with Fabrice Bellard (prolific programmer)

molyss• 10 years ago

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

bobbylox• 10 years ago

I've thought about writing an "Another World"-style game engine many times myself.

stordoff• 10 years ago

I'm not a big fan of the game (love its style, but the gameplay hasn't aged well IMO - playing it for the first time in 2014 probably didn't help), but this is a really neat architecture. Thanks for the link.

percept2• 10 years ago

Nobody mentioned git?

johan_larson• 10 years ago

I'd be a bit surprised if anyone did. Git is powerful and flexible, but it is also complicated and difficult to use for people who aren't experts.

Beautiful software should make simple things simple, and hard things possible. Git leans strongly toward the latter, to the detriment of the former.

I need version control software that's mostly like a shovel and maybe sometimes like a backhoe. Git is like one of these:

http://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/wp-content/uploads/sit...

collyw4• 10 years ago

I am of the same opinion as you. I have started using git flow recently and it keeps me from shooting myself in the foot as often.

So far this is as much documentation I have needed. http://danielkummer.github.io/git-flow-cheatsheet/

based2• 10 years ago

Kay's power tools

sevkih• 10 years ago

why plan9 hasn't come up yet?

huuu• 10 years ago

For me it's Blender.

  - Starts in a sec.
  - API is the program, the GUI just an interface.
  - Free but very professional
  - Shortcuts are ergonomic.

agumonkey9• 10 years ago

Reminds me of Maya. I had to sit down for a minute when I realize 90% of the UI is a mel Script. The core of the software is an interpreter/server for some lazy DAG. Actually I wanted to mention Maya, from its performance on piss poor[1] desktop hardware of the late 90s it was able to pull real time Rigid Body dynamics over Nurbs surface (and even pseudo Non Rigid) while staying responsive.

[1] Pentium 2 350 with a NV3 ~gpu.

frik• 10 years ago

Blender is great, but the UI is very non-standard (for little benefit). A good program can be used by domain experts without reading the manual, something that's not possible with Blender. 3D Max, 4D Studio, and CAD apps like CATIA have a much more intuitive UI.

jakobegger• 10 years ago

Yes. I've dabbled with blender a couple of times, and it's infuriating how hard it is to do simple things like rearranging palettes. Blender is different than any other software I've used, and is unique in requiring a tutorial just to understand basic stuff like how to open and save files...

hatsunearu• 10 years ago

Rust. It's god damn beautiful. It's design is magnificent, so much so that it seems easy to write beautiful rust code myself.

matteotom• 10 years ago

Also, the documentation is one of the best among all languages I have used

steveklabnik• 10 years ago

Thank you so much!

neikos• 10 years ago

Yes, there is a special kind of joy knowing that unless the underlying infrastructure has a problem you have handled all the edge cases, and it is still readable.

AsyncAwait• 10 years ago

I also think Rust is magnificent, the way they combined manual memory management with the feel of an automatic one, all at compile time, paired with the rest of the type system; functional, compossible and flexible, is exactly the level of practical, useable innovation I would like to see more frequently.

ycmbntrthrwaway6• 10 years ago

dwm: http://dwm.suckless.org/

gravypod3• 10 years ago

I found this a while ago on hackernews: https://github.com/Hypsurus/skod

Amazing source.

ycmbntrthrwaway6• 10 years ago

Why not use enum?

https://github.com/Hypsurus/skod/blob/master/src/skod.c#L290

Also, at least some functions should be static.

_cla means "command line arguments", not obvious.

Useless comments: https://github.com/Hypsurus/skod/blob/master/src/skod.c#L273

gravypod3• 10 years ago

Not my software, but if you have looked at other FTP clients this is an amazing thing to read though.

ycmbntrthrwaway6• 10 years ago

http://suckless.org/rocks

weej• 10 years ago

"Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think" is a book that attempts to to tackle this topic. "The authors think aloud as they work through their project's architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules." The book has been sitting in my to-read stack forever. You might want to check it out.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596510046.do

ponderatul3• 10 years ago

I need to get myself a copy!

vram222• 10 years ago

Yes. IIRC, they also had a series of posts on the same topic, with columns by some well-known programmers, maybe on programming.oreilly.com or radar.oreilly.com - some years ago.

awinter-py• 10 years ago

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 functional style is something that 'clicked' when I fell into it.

agumonkey9• 10 years ago

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

phkahler2• 10 years ago

SolveSpace - parametric CAD program. Single executable, well done UI, small code base, nice constraint solver, originally by a single person. It's the only OSS CAD I've found useful (QCad was second, then FreeCAD). There are also a few active developers now with major improvements on the way.

upstandingdude• 10 years ago

Cool! I was looking for a decent free CAD program. Will check it out.

phkahler2• 10 years ago

Be sure to get the latest from whitequarks repository. He's been doing (or integrating) most of the recent development including the GTK3 and native OS X ports.

paulsutter• 10 years ago

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

BigJono• 10 years ago

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?

rahimnathwani• 10 years ago

This paper[0] says "In addition it receives a reward rt representing the change in game score."

[0] https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~vmnih/docs/dqn.pdf

slpsys• 10 years ago

There is an objective, but it may not be exactly as you reason about it. There's a great video that made the rounds last year about building a neural net that plays Super Mario World, that may help visualize what's going on - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44

There's also a great snippet in the currently-ongoing AlphaGo videos that explains that when AlphaGo plays in ways that you may not expect, it's because it's strictly worried about _winning_ (even by the slimmest margin) with the greatest probability, and not necessarily by winning handily, like a human might.

ycmbntrthrwaway6• 10 years ago

X11 terminal emulator as one C file: http://git.suckless.org/st/tree/st.c

reitanqild• 10 years ago

Kind of out-of-place but Manic Time is the best GUI I remember having used on Windows.

It has every feature but takes 5 minutes to learn. And it (mostly) seems to do the most reasonable thing every time you do anything.

(plus: there is a working free model and a really useful paid upgrade.)

s_dev• 10 years ago

Apparently Doom 3:

http://kotaku.com/5975610/the-exceptional-beauty-of-doom-3s-...

mcculley• 10 years ago

I learned an enormous amount about how to ship code that works on multiple platforms back in the 90s just by reading the GNU Emacs and XEmacs source code. I really owe a lot to that source code being available.

pmarreck• 10 years ago

http://smile.amazon.com/Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-P...

This book might help.

H&P is great, by the way. It was that book and "Cathedral & The Bazaar" that made me quit a Microsoft-only job and go open-source.

joshuata• 10 years ago

My vote is for SQLite. It is very well written, incredibly well tested, and one of the simplest and most flexible tools out there. My favorite part is the extensive documentation explaining the architecture decisions they made.

TickleSteve• 10 years ago

is this more a case of 'well-engineered'?

I agree the quality of SQLite is very high, but is it just devotion to details or aesthetic?

EdwardDiego• 10 years ago

I'd argue that good engineering is beautiful also.

marcolinux• 10 years ago

And according to them, valgrind (and linux) can be qualified as beautiful piece of code[1]:

"Valgrind is perhaps the most amazing and useful developer tool in the world. Valgrind is a simulator - it simulates an x86 running a Linux binary. (Ports of Valgrind for platforms other than Linux are in development, but as of this writing, Valgrind only works reliably on Linux, which in the opinion of the SQLite developers means that Linux should be the preferred platform for all software development.) As Valgrind runs a Linux binary, it looks for all kinds of interesting errors such as array overruns, reading from uninitialized memory, stack overflows, memory leaks, and so forth. Valgrind finds problems that can easily slip through all of the other tests run against SQLite. And, when Valgrind does find an error, it can dump the developer directly into a symbolic debugger at the exact point where the error occur, to facilitate a quick fix." [1] https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html

trentnelson• 10 years ago

Aesthetically, SQLite is some of the most perversely formatted C code I've ever seen. I find it more painful to view than GNU-style C.

braythwayt• 10 years ago

The HashLife algorithm for Conway’s Game of Life:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife

My implementations in Literate CoffeeScript:

http://recursiveuniver.se

And JavaScript:

http://raganwald.com/hashlife

agumonkey9• 10 years ago

maru lisp by ian piumarta : Maru is a symbolic expression evaluator that can compile its own implementation language.

http://piumarta.com/software/maru/

wstrange• 10 years ago

ZFS

The idea of collapsing a volume manager and file system into one was very innovative and led to substantially more functionality with less code (although some called it a "rampant layering violation" ).

ZFS is a joy to use, dead simple, and arguably the most robust file system out there.

agumonkey9• 10 years ago

The source code is pretty neat too. At least at FreeBSD 9.2.

agumonkey9• 10 years ago

Let's make an OS out of that thread.

vmorgulis2• 10 years ago

Oberon, TempleOS or OpenGenera. These projects are vertical, consistent and use only one programming language.

In OpenGenera, everything displayed on the screen is typed and can be retrieved as an s-expression (like in a web browser):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk

https://github.com/ynniv/opengenera#additional-reading

rwallace• 10 years ago

The Scheme programming language. As close to the core essence of programming as an actually usable, practical programming language has ever come.

LLVM. Being able to fully represent general code in a simple, well-defined, readable text-based format is a far bigger achievement than you would think until you look at what it took to do it.

klibertp2• 10 years ago

Erm... Which Scheme? Or do you mean the standard?

qwertyuiop9246• 10 years ago

I think he means R5RS. But honestly, It's missing a bit of what you need for most programming. Chicken Scheme is probably the best actual scheme on the sliding scale of elegance/power, IMHO.

type0• 10 years ago

Emacs

CoryG89• 10 years ago

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 chain, the TCP network protocol, the BitTorrent protocol, Dijkstra’s algorithm, etc.

CephalopodMD• 10 years ago

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.

supdog• 10 years ago

Indeed. No Starch Press's book on TCP/IP by Kozierok is 1600 pages!

RINA is a beautiful new redesign of the networking stack wherein "computer networking is just inter-process communication."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_InterNetwork_Archi...

tbrock5• 10 years ago

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.

Biganon• 10 years ago

Isn't Flask made by Armin Ronacher?

tbrock5• 10 years ago

Oh right, whatever Kenneth Reitz did then

abustamam• 10 years ago

Too bad TJ stopped writing JS and started writing Go.

tbrock5• 10 years ago

Yeah, too bad. Apex, his first go thing, is pretty great though.

max_• 10 years ago

TJ tends to jump mon on from one language to another.. first Ruby(when Ruby was the thing), then JS(when NodeJS became popular) and now Golang(the current "thing")

timqian• 10 years ago

And now he is writing a language https://github.com/tj/luna

oluckyman• 10 years ago

"The code twists and contorts ruby in unimaginable ways." Doesn't sound like my idea of beautiful software.

skewart2• 10 years ago

I completely agree. It sounds like the opposite of beautiful software if you ask me. Maybe it's interesting, thought-provoking, or amusing code, but not beautiful.

Obi_Juan_Kenobi• 10 years ago

I think it's perhaps not inappropriate for Ruby; it has a community that's all about 'magic' and even 'tricky' beauty. I certainly agree there are problems with this, but I also see how this is appealing in certain contexts.

azaras• 10 years ago

This is awful code for Python but beautiful for Ruby. Python is "simplicity" and Ruby is "clever".

skewart2• 10 years ago

I think that list is more of an answer to the question "What are some examples of widely-used FOSS projects created by famous programmers" than it is an answer to OP's question about beautiful software.

codezero• 10 years ago

I'd love to see your recommendations. Personally I find the redis source code to be extremely readable and well organized.

Also these people didn't become "famous" for their Instagram selfies.

blablabla123• 10 years ago

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

The first file I opened has 3 gotos but maybe it's pure randomness... ;p

lorenzhs• 10 years ago

gotos are sometimes used in C for error handling (to release resources), it's a simple way to do cleanup:

    void foo() {
        int* foo = malloc(...)
        if (foo == NULL) goto err_foo;
    
        int* bar = malloc(...)
        if (bar == NULL) goto err_bar;
    
        /* code */
    
    err_bar:
        free(bar);
    err_foo:
        free(foo);
    }

That's a use of goto that's often considered non-evil, probably because the alternatives are typically a lot more ugly.

iurisilvio• 10 years ago

Python: anything written by Kenneth Reitz or Armin Ronacher. You probably already used something from them.

Beautiful APIs and clean code. It is easy to contribute to their projects.

kakwa_• 10 years ago

I've not used it in recent years, but PolarSSL (now mbed TLS) was quite nice for a crypto library. It's a light, simple and clear C library.

Not directly code, but the "Beyond pep 8" talk at PyCon 2015 by Raymond Hettinger is quite nice (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M). It gives interesting tips on how to separate "business logic" (the high level problem you try to solve) from the "purely technical stuff".

muzani2• 10 years ago

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.

kpil3• 10 years ago

It's having a rather half-hearted schema definition language though, and the json-encoding itself contains a few fuzzy corners, lacking important data types, and is to be honest not particulary sophisticated.

On the other hand, it's readable, good enough for most tasks, not overly complex, and it's nicer than XML. That is not a small acomplishment.

Still... I am waiting for ASN.2 ... All good features and ideas from ASN.1 without everything bad, which is rather much too :-)

One good idea from ANS.1 is "criticality", how important a future extension to a protocol is, which means that older participants can still handle newer messages, if they contain no "critical" extensions.

Another good thing is that the encoding is detached from the schema representation, which is too good for people to appreciate. You can use the same schema to send XML, BER (original simple tag-value binary format), PER (no unneccesary bytes are sent), or plain strings. (No JSON yet - at least in the standard)

In that way, it's possible to select encoders that suits the mission. Send human-readable data when size/speed/consistency does not matter, and packed super efficient messages when sending from a space probe. Same schema.

ASN.1 is ugly as hell though, and clearly designed by committee.

stray2• 10 years ago

JSON is just this beautiful thing that lets you store data however you want.

What if I want to store integers?

Not floats.

Integers.

erichurkman• 10 years ago

Or dates? No one would ever need to store dates or times, right?

ktRolster2• 10 years ago

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

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

k3n• 10 years ago

Can you provide some more context?

    > JSON.stringify(1)
    "1"

Stored without a decimal for free, seems like it'd be up to the receiver to interpret it correctly.

What if you receive it in JS?

    JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(1))
    > 1

Ok, so it parses an int for free too... thus my confusion.

Regardless, you can still override anything it does considering the second argument to both `JSON.parse()` and `JSON.stringify()` allows you to provide your own function for handling the logic as you see fit.

dorfsmay3• 10 years ago

No comment.

dorfsmay3• 10 years ago

I'm don't understand how JSON is better than XML, edn, toml, or yaml. They all have pros and cons, but if I had to pick one as being beautiful, it wouldn't be json!

pbreit• 10 years ago

Which would you pick? Certainly not xml?

collyw4• 10 years ago

JSON is not all its cracked up to be. It is useful, but I find its getting treated as some sort of magical solution to everything in the way that XML was 15 years ago.

I have had to configure various pieces of software in JSON and its a PITA (compared to doing the same sort of thing in Python, or most configuration files actually). Its picky about what quotes you use. Its picky about leaving trailing commas in arrays. Its not particularly readable (compared to YAML or XML). It only has one numerical type.

fitzwatermellow• 10 years ago

Unreal Engine 4

https://www.unrealengine.com/ue4-on-github

mintplant• 10 years ago

The software or the code? From a user perspective, the editor is full of bugs and unpleasant surprises.

jpgvm• 10 years ago

PostgreSQL. The best C codebase I have ever worked with and IMO very beautiful and well designed.

elkhourygeorges• 10 years ago

Ruby on Rails. It's literally beautiful.

e12e2• 10 years ago

Might add that what I've seen of the internals of both Sqeak/Pharo Smalltalk and Racket would probably qualify as beautiful software.

zachrose• 10 years ago

Not working software per se, but I think there's a lot of beauty in the way Sandi Metz demos a refactoring of a thing called The Gilded Rose in this video:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE

im_down_w_otp• 10 years ago

Joe Armstrong's "Universal Server".

myhf• 10 years ago

djb servers are really beautiful. Built securely from the ground up, with very little attack surface area.

http://thedjbway.b0llix.net/

dorfsmay3• 10 years ago

bottlepy is a one file web framework that just works in both python2 and python3.

userbinator• 10 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558822

A tiny self-interpreting compiler and virtual machine. The beauty is in how amazingly minimal and yet functional it is.

foota2• 10 years ago

I'm a big fan of SqlAlchemy for python.

collyw4• 10 years ago

Curious why this got downvoted. I have never looked at the source code, but I often hear that its a very well engineered library.

foota2• 10 years ago

You and me both :) I almost asked people why.

I think part of it has to do with the fact that sqlalchemy isn't by any means a small library and has a lot of elbow grease put into it.

It isn't some ornate stained glass window, it's bullet proof glass.

ktRolster2• 10 years ago

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"

0xAC1DBA5E• 10 years ago

IDTECH[0-9]+

shameless fanboy here

shumster• 10 years ago

visiplanes ftw!

cdcarter• 10 years ago

Camping -- it was _why the lucky stiff's Ruby web-microframework, under 4k of code and absolutely brilliant from top to bottom.

numlocked• 10 years ago

qmail and djbdns by D. J. Bernstein. But don't take my word for it:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/djb

altitudinous• 10 years ago

Well, I think Jonathan Blow's Braid is a beautiful thing. Many in here seem to be talking about the beauty of the source code or something related, but I like a simple well executed idea that is beautiful to look at as well. No corners were cut here - I think it is a work of art.

andrepd• 10 years ago

If we are going that road, many games qualify. (Portal takes my vote)

Quiark• 10 years ago

IPFS

Just read through the design, it's very simple and extremely modular. It learns the lessons from previous related systems and applies them in the new system.

lkrubner• 10 years ago

Anything by Zach Tellman:

https://github.com/ztellman/aleph

https://github.com/ztellman/automat

In terms of his ideas, watch "Always be composing":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oQTSP4FngY

And he offers some great thoughts about queues and backpressure in "Everything will flow":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bNOO3xxMc0

escherize• 10 years ago

Wow, I knew about aleph, but just learned of automat. I was always a fan of FSMs in school, and automat's readme gave me goosebumps. Thanks!

slantedview• 10 years ago

I was going to post this. Not only is Zach's work very creative, but it's very well written, composable stuff.

dschiptsov4• 10 years ago

"Always be composing"

the ideas were stolen from the Wizards talk

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

prospero• 10 years ago

I wasn't aware of this talk, so I'm not sure how I could have stolen anything from it. Cool link, though, thanks.

zem2• 10 years ago

i maintain a lingering fondness for the [aurora text editor](http://www-personal.umich.edu/~knassen/aurora.html), a dos-based text editor that was, like emacs, largely written in its own scripting language. the editor was sadly closed-source and has now gone the way of most closed source stuff, but the scripted bits were open source, and they were a real pleasure to work with. again, like emacs, you could build some surprisingly non-text-editor-like things on top of it.

davepeck• 10 years ago

I've always found FreeType to be quite wonderful; it integrates the artistry and mathematics of typography with entertaining low-level wizardry.

Take a look at the rasterizer, for example: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/freetype/freetype2.git/tree...

sysret• 10 years ago

examples:

1. a. whitney 2. ioccc.org winners (djb, etc.)

what makes [some] software beautiful?

the ugliness of other software.

most software is large, slow, complicated and bug-ridden.

this makes small, fast, clean software written by competent programmers "beautiful".

taste varies. what is too terse and "obfuscated" to some is pleasingly succinct and manageable to others.

right now there's another post about yann lecun on the front page. he once wrote a lisp-like interpreter that compiles to C called "lush". of all the lisps i have tried i think it's one of the more "beautiful" ones in it's design.

nstart• 10 years ago

This might sound crazy but I actually found the discourse source code to be a beautiful thing. When I read it I had never used ruby beyond understanding the syntax via ruby koans. And one day I wanted to learn how they manage long running tasks without blocking the rest of the web application, and so I jumped into the code using only github and github source code search. 15 minutes in I had notes which drew the entire picture of how and where sidekiq comes in and how and where emails are constructed (I was starting out by trying to understand how things like password reset emails are handled iirc). I know there must be some ugly parts in there, but I went in with no understanding of what to look for except some keywords. I came back with a pragmatic understanding of how to implement a certain workflow regardless of language or framework. This was the mark of something beautiful to me.

lucaswiman• 10 years ago

Peter Norvig's sudoku solver is beautiful on all levels. http://norvig.com/sudoku.html

It's clearly explained code that's shorter than you would have thought. Norvig showcases his expertise in manipulating both the basic data structure of the Python language, and a deep understanding of the underlying problem and methods for solving it.

mdpopescu• 10 years ago

Ouch. I admire Norvig, but that's one of the most horrible pieces of code I have ever seen. I've read that page several times, I've even translated it to C# - https://github.com/mdpopescu/public/blob/master/Sudoku/Sudok... - but I still think it's incredibly ugly. I will admit that my knowledge of Python is very basic but still, if I had to maintain that code without the entire description around it, I'd give up and rewrite it.

lewisjoe2• 10 years ago

Werkzeug's Jinja2 templating engine written in Python.

I happened to dig into its source code for something and eventually found myself amazed at how the entire base is beautifully laid out. It's no nowhere near being naive. It's almost a simple programming language implemented in python. A compiler of sorts with its own abstract syntax tree and stuff. Yet the code is very readable, straight forward and just taught me how to write good python.

[edit] corrected typo.

plaes• 10 years ago

You mean Jinja2?

Also, Jinja2 and Werkzeug aren't coupled - you can use practically any Python templating lib with it as Werkzeug is just a WSGI library (+ and of course something else..).

And they happen to share the author.

lewisjoe2• 10 years ago

Yeah, my bad. Updated the details. Thanks. 'Mitsuhiko' is a hard name to remember.

iamd3vil• 10 years ago

Erlang Virtual Machine - It's an amazing piece of software

dschiptsov4• 10 years ago

   nginx/src/core/*

executesorder66• 10 years ago

bspwm [0] + sxhkd [1]

  [0] https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm
  [1] https://github.com/baskerville/sxhkd

dschiptsov4• 10 years ago

There is a few rather universal generalizations about most of these projects people find beautiful - the code has been written after throughout understanding of what one is doing and why - the domain, the first principles, the logic and the representation. And then one returns and refines (refactors) the code several times as long as one's understanding clarifies in the process of writing it down.

Jumping right into IDE to solve a problem is a way to end up with bullshit, like to write down the contents of undeveloped and undisciplined mind.

"My code is my documentation", or auto-generated "documentation" is bullshit for the same reasons.

baby• 10 years ago

Look at Laravel, every comments is made on 3 lines that go smaller and smaller. The amount of details in the framework is pretty huge.

murukesh_s• 10 years ago

Why do we assume that software is same as code? I wonder if graphics tools(like photoshop) were't invented as a point and click tool, but something that you would need to code instead, we would have praised some X or Y instead of Z..

Ace17• 10 years ago

I'm seeing a lot of meanings to "beautiful" here, please, let's define what we're talking about.

Does "beautiful" means "the code is clean"? If so, the Quake source code is "beautiful", while Duke3D Build engine is "ugly".

Does "beaufitul" means "the code is clever"? If so, gcc, ffmpeg and ODE are "beautiful", and Google's Ninja is "tasteless".

Does "beautiful" means "the code is modular" (I mean "open-closed" here)? If so, VLC is "beautiful", and everything monolithic is "ugly" (gcc, Linux, systemd, LLVM, ...).

Does "beautiful" means "the software performs flawlessly"? If so, the Duke3D Build engine, Quake's engine, and Portal's physics engine are "beautiful", while VLC is "ugly".

Does "beautiful" means "the software embodies a clever concept"? If so, "grep" and "xargs" are "beautiful", and the Windows Batch interpreter is "ugly".

Does "beautiful" means "the software is easy to use"? If so, the Windows calculator is "beautiful", while Mathematica and vim are "ugly".

Does "beautiful" means "the software can be twisted in lots of interesting ways"? If so, dynamic language interpreters are "beautiful", while static language compilers are "ugly".

My point is, any piece of software can be seen as "beautiful" or "ugly".

We have meaningful objective attributes at our disposal, like "simple", "clever", "fit", "robust", "fast", "small", "user friendly"... let's use them!

wingerlang• 10 years ago

What if OP wanted different examples and the explanation why they are beautiful in the posters opinion? Seems like it would get more interesting submission than simply asking for "small" software.

lucideer• 10 years ago

I completely agree with wingerlang here, and I think the fact that the OP ends with

... and what makes it beautiful.

makes this clear. It's a subjective question deliberately looking to elicit subjective answers, with the point of interest being the individual justifications behind those answers.

However, despite my disagreement with your sentiment (calling for a more objective question), you did actually answer the question as well. Thanks for the list.

ponderatul3• 10 years ago

Hi, that is exactly what I meant. The reasoning behind it is just as important as what it is your example.

Paul Graham says in Hacker's and Painters that “... If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need good taste to make good things. Instead of treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy abstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff?”

So I'm really looking for patterns here. 'Clean code' seems to be a characteristic of beautiful software. Another one seems to be ' code is clever ' from what I see.

That's all I'm doing here, finding some patterns. So if I would've asked what are some example of beautiful software ( where beautiful means 'clean code') I might've gotten a more focused set of responses, but then I would've missed out on the other dimensions of beautiful.

eru3• 10 years ago

Does "beautiful" means "the software can be twisted in lots of interesting ways"? If so, dynamic language interpreters are "beautiful", while static language compilers are "ugly".

You'd be surprised what people do to static language compilers. C++'s template are turing complete, after all.

pjc50• 10 years ago

Templates can achieve "towering soviet concrete brutalist monument to ugliness" levels of ugly.

munificent• 10 years ago

One could argue that's precisely because they stuff a dynamic language interpreter inside a static language compiler. :)

jbms• 10 years ago

This is a superb comment that illustrates how for a given purpose different quality factors are important. Can anyone recommend resources that try to systemise why these choices are made?

Edit: Grammar.

muzani2• 10 years ago

I would define it as something that evokes emotion and admiration.

It can be something that makes you calm, angry, disgusted. The more so, the better. Javascript and Windows are great examples of this.

Almost always you'd sit there and wonder why anyone would go to the lengths to build this. Lengths can mean that they went to the effort of simplifying a complicated thing or even making a complicated thing absurdly complicated.

E.g. I see beauty in the Sydney Opera House, not only because of its form, but because they managed to build a grand opera house in one of the least culturally sophisticated cities in the world. There's just something completely out of place about the Sydney Opera House and that's what makes it so beautiful. Most people think the characteristic roof symbolizes sails, but it's actually an orange peel. It's like a clever prank.

When you go back to the Hackers and Painters essay - PG tries to associate the two together. Beautiful hacks are like shortcuts that work. Almost always a great hack does something dumb, but is very effective.

z3t4• 10 years ago

This is highly opinionated. It will change from person to person, even for the same person in different times of his/her life. My answer would be that "when the planets align": Meaning the right product at the right time.

jarcane• 10 years ago

The Haskell and Clojure standard libraries.

It's very rare in a programming language that I can click through to the implementation of a function and actually understand the code I get through the wall of error checking and coercion and OOP gobbledygook to even make sense of what I'm looking at.

But I've never had this problem in Haskell or Clojure. Haskell because that awesome type system makes most of that boilerplate unnecessary, and Clojure because for good or ill, the priority seems to be on clarity of code and letting the Java type system kind of catch a lot of the obvious errors.

Racket, on the other hand, much as I love it, when I go looking at it's internals most of the time it's practically unintelligible to me.

qwertyuiop9246• 10 years ago

Racket, on the other hand, much as I love it, when I go looking at it's internals most of the time it's practically unintelligible to me.

This is one of the reasons Racket never appealed to me. R5RS and R7RS are so simple that you can write most of the interpreter in about a page of code in the language. Although if you read SICP, you already know that :-).

Racket and R6RS, OTOH, are full to the brim with complex systems that all interact in a manner that's hard to wrap your head around. Custodians, Contracts, OOP, Delimited Continuations, all there by default... It's just too much. I also dislike syntax-case, but that's more of a personal issue than anything else.

I'd even prefer Common Lisp. Sure, it's about the same size at least, but it's not trying to make you use 5 paradigms at once. Sure, you COULD, but you don't HAVE to. But then, I suppose that is what lisp is about.

booop• 10 years ago

I'm surprised no one has mentioned roller coaster tycoon. 99% of the game was written by one man in x86 assembly and it ran beautifully.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-03-03-a-big-interview...

and

http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm

ranko• 10 years ago

"If Hemingway Wrote Javascript" (https://www.nostarch.com/hemingway, see also https://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2015/01/05/if-hemingw...), in which five short programs are each written in five different styles (all in Javascript). It shows how different programming styles can be used in the same language to solve the same problem. It's unlikely that you'll start writing in the style of Borges or Austen after reading this, but it is entertaining and amusing.

motyar• 10 years ago

vim

rpdillon• 10 years ago

The Emacs source code was always impressive to me. Much is lisp, but even the primitives (like buffer) that are written in C use macros to maintain semantic parity with the lisp code, defining macros like EQ and DEFUN. It's kind of fun to read (for me, anyway). https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/src/buffer...

collyw4• 10 years ago

Anything written in Perl.

aggieben• 10 years ago

I think the OpenBSD code is quite nice, actually (maybe not the cross-platform bits).

lambdafunc• 10 years ago

Presto also has a high quality codebase: https://github.com/facebook/presto

Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

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