Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?

C: anything by antirez (redis, etc...) Redis is the epitome of well written understandable C.<p>Ruby: anything written by _why (if you can find the source) He once gave a whole presentation on the splat operator and it&#x27;s bizarre uses that gave me goosebumps. A true artist. The code twists and contorts ruby in unimaginable ways.<p>JS: anything written by TJ hollwaychuck (express, mocha, etc...) Express is so simple but powerful, when you read the source you can&#x27;t help but wonder where the rest of the code is.<p>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.

I&#x27;m seeing a lot of meanings to &quot;beautiful&quot; here, please, let&#x27;s define what we&#x27;re talking about.<p>Does &quot;beautiful&quot; means &quot;the code is clean&quot;? If so, the Quake source code is &quot;beautiful&quot;, while Duke3D Build engine is &quot;ugly&quot;.<p>Does &quot;beaufitul&quot; means &quot;the code is clever&quot;? If so, gcc, ffmpeg and ODE are &quot;beautiful&quot;, and Google&#x27;s Ninja is &quot;tasteless&quot;.<p>Does &quot;beautiful&quot; means &quot;the code is modular&quot; (I mean &quot;open-closed&quot; here)? If so, VLC is &quot;beautiful&quot;, and everything monolithic is &quot;ugly&quot; (gcc, Linux, systemd, LLVM, ...).<p>Does &quot;beautiful&quot; means &quot;the software performs flawlessly&quot;? If so, the Duke3D Build engine, Quake&#x27;s engine, and Portal&#x27;s physics engine are &quot;beautiful&quot;, while VLC is &quot;ugly&quot;.<p>Does &quot;beautiful&quot; means &quot;the software embodies a clever concept&quot;? If so, &quot;grep&quot; and &quot;xargs&quot; are &quot;beautiful&quot;, and the Windows Batch interpreter is &quot;ugly&quot;.<p>Does &quot;beautiful&quot; means &quot;the software is easy to use&quot;? If so, the Windows calculator is &quot;beautiful&quot;, while Mathematica and vim are &quot;ugly&quot;.<p>Does &quot;beautiful&quot; means &quot;the software can be twisted in lots of interesting ways&quot;? If so, dynamic language interpreters are &quot;beautiful&quot;, while static language compilers are &quot;ugly&quot;.<p>My point is, any piece of software can be seen as &quot;beautiful&quot; or &quot;ugly&quot;.<p>We have meaningful objective attributes at our disposal, like &quot;simple&quot;, &quot;clever&quot;, &quot;fit&quot;, &quot;robust&quot;, &quot;fast&quot;, &quot;small&quot;, &quot;user friendly&quot;... let&#x27;s use them!

&quot;Another World&quot; There&#x27;s a very interesting write up here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fabiensanglard.net&#x2F;anotherWorld_code_review&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fabiensanglard.net&#x2F;anotherWorld_code_review&#x2F;</a><p>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&#x27;d like to architect it like &quot;Another World&quot;.

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.

Varnish cache.<p>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!<p>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.<p>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 (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;queue.acm.org&#x2F;detail.cfm?id=1814327" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;queue.acm.org&#x2F;detail.cfm?id=1814327</a>).

LuaJIT. It&#x27;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.<p>Mike Pall is a demigod.

Turbo Pascal for DOS. Simple, compact, quick, well documented, reasonably easy to learn, and not too expensive.<p>I think that bloat is the enemy of beauty, so we&#x27;re probably likely to find beauty in software that does a few things well.

The most beautiful I&#x27;m aware of is Robert Strandh&#x27;s SICL (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;robert-strandh&#x2F;SICL" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;robert-strandh&#x2F;SICL</a>). CL-PPCRE (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;edicl&#x2F;cl-ppcre" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;edicl&#x2F;cl-ppcre</a>) is very nice as well, imo.<p>What makes them beautiful? They&#x27;re very straight forward and clearly communicate what they&#x27;re doing, and how.<p>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.<p>There are no surprises.<p>In terms of conceptual beauty, it&#x27;d be hard to beat Screamer (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nikodemus&#x2F;screamer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nikodemus&#x2F;screamer</a>).<p>What makes this beautiful? The way it makes a hairy problem seem simple and straight-forward.

&quot;Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think&quot; is a book that attempts to to tackle this topic. &quot;The authors think aloud as they work through their project&#x27;s architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules.&quot; The book has been sitting in my to-read stack forever. You might want to check it out.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shop.oreilly.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;9780596510046.do" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shop.oreilly.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;9780596510046.do</a>

ZFS<p>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 &quot;rampant layering violation&quot; ).<p>ZFS is a joy to use, dead simple, and arguably the most robust file system out there.

I really like reading most code from John Carmack, e.g. Quake 1-3. Much of it can be seen here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;id-Software" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;id-Software</a>

Rust. It&#x27;s god damn beautiful. It&#x27;s design is magnificent, so much so that it seems easy to write beautiful rust code myself.

The Deepmind Atari Player is only 22KB of source code:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sites.google.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;deepmind.com&#x2F;dqn&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sites.google.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;deepmind.com&#x2F;dqn&#x2F;</a><p>If you haven&#x27;t seen the video it&#x27;s remarkable:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EfGD2qveGdQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EfGD2qveGdQ</a>

The Go standard library. At least two things coming together: A stripped down language, that explicitly aims to be readable and experienced programmers &#x2F; authors.

Doom.<p>At the time I had never heard of Binary Space Partition Trees. Beautiful concept for a monument of a game.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fabiensanglard.net&#x2F;doomIphone&#x2F;doomClassicRenderer.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fabiensanglard.net&#x2F;doomIphone&#x2F;doomClassicRenderer.php</a>

The Haskell and Clojure standard libraries.<p>It&#x27;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&#x27;m looking at.<p>But I&#x27;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.<p>Racket, on the other hand, much as I love it, when I go looking at it&#x27;s internals most of the time it&#x27;s practically unintelligible to me.

Personally, I like Tarsnap and anything from the OpenBSD project. Of course, this is highly subjective, and I would not call the code &#x27;beautiful&#x27;. 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.

JSON.<p>The way it displays and organizes complex data, better than other standards like CSV or XML. Or the things that use tables.<p>When I first started programming, I had two favorite ways of storing data - INI and arrays. INI for its elegant key&#x2F;value style. Arrays were just natural because of the way computers think.<p>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)<p>JSON is just this beautiful thing that lets you store data however you want. It&#x27;s beautiful because it doesn&#x27;t get in the way. Not only that, but it&#x27;s a data structure you can understand just by looking at it; you&#x27;d have to squint to understand raw XML or a SQL table.

Peter Norvig&#x27;s sudoku solver is beautiful on all levels. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;norvig.com&#x2F;sudoku.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;norvig.com&#x2F;sudoku.html</a><p>It&#x27;s clearly explained code that&#x27;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.

For me, learning about functional programming and &#x27;feeling my way&#x27; into avoiding excess local vars, paying careful attention to side effects. To be clear: I&#x27;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&#x27;re not &#x27;necessary enough&#x27;).<p>I&#x27;m not saying my code is particularly readable to anyone but me, but functional style is something that &#x27;clicked&#x27; when I fell into it.

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.

Redis is my favorite example. It&#x27;s some of the easiest to read, digest, and modify source code out there.

X11 terminal emulator as one C file: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.suckless.org&#x2F;st&#x2F;tree&#x2F;st.c" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.suckless.org&#x2F;st&#x2F;tree&#x2F;st.c</a>

Knuth&#x27;s TeX. Set the standards for documentation, reliability, portability, typography, extensibility and scripting, is well into its fourth decade and is free software.

Arthur Whitney&#x27;s one-page interpreter: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.jsoftware.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Essays&#x2F;Incunabulum" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.jsoftware.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Essays&#x2F;Incunabulum</a>

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

Beautiful software =&#x2F;= beautiful code.<p>Beautiful software: Java Virtual Machine (the code? could be entirely un-beautiful ;)

Oberon, TempleOS or OpenGenera. These projects are vertical, consistent and use only one programming language.<p>In OpenGenera, everything displayed on the screen is typed and can be retrieved as an s-expression (like in a web browser):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ynniv&#x2F;opengenera#additional-reading" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ynniv&#x2F;opengenera#additional-reading</a>

Werkzeug&#x27;s Jinja2 templating engine written in Python.<p>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&#x27;s no nowhere near being naive. It&#x27;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.<p>[edit] corrected typo.

Anything by Zach Tellman:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ztellman&#x2F;aleph" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ztellman&#x2F;aleph</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ztellman&#x2F;automat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ztellman&#x2F;automat</a><p>In terms of his ideas, watch &quot;Always be composing&quot;:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=3oQTSP4FngY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=3oQTSP4FngY</a><p>And he offers some great thoughts about queues and backpressure in &quot;Everything will flow&quot;:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=1bNOO3xxMc0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=1bNOO3xxMc0</a>

For me it&#x27;s Blender.<p><pre><code> - Starts in a sec. - API is the program, the GUI just an interface. - Free but very professional - Shortcuts are ergonomic.</code></pre>

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

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&#x27;s kind of fun to read (for me, anyway). <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;emacs-mirror&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;buffer.c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;emacs-mirror&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;buffer...</a>

Not sure if this is what you&#x27;re looking for, but from the UX side, Square Cash.<p>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 &quot;just works&quot; by default.

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.<p>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.<p>A few examples I can think of are: Google PageRank algorithm, Bitcoin&#x27;s protocol and the block chain, the TCP network protocol, the BitTorrent protocol, Dijkstra’s algorithm, etc.

SolveSpace - parametric CAD program. Single executable, well done UI, small code base, nice constraint solver, originally by a single person. It&#x27;s the only OSS CAD I&#x27;ve found useful (QCad was second, then FreeCAD). There are also a few active developers now with major improvements on the way.

&quot;If Hemingway Wrote Javascript&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nostarch.com&#x2F;hemingway" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nostarch.com&#x2F;hemingway</a>, see also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;javascriptweblog.wordpress.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;05&#x2F;if-hemingway-wrote-javascript-explained&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;javascriptweblog.wordpress.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;05&#x2F;if-hemingw...</a>), 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&#x27;s unlikely that you&#x27;ll start writing in the style of Borges or Austen after reading this, but it is entertaining and amusing.

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.

Beautiful code: graph search in prolog. So much in as few lines as possible[1]<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cse.unsw.edu.au&#x2F;~billw&#x2F;cs9414&#x2F;notes&#x2F;prolog&#x2F;path-trace.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cse.unsw.edu.au&#x2F;~billw&#x2F;cs9414&#x2F;notes&#x2F;prolog&#x2F;path-t...</a>

There is a really good list covered in detail here:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aosabook.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aosabook.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;index.html</a>

I found this a while ago on hackernews: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Hypsurus&#x2F;skod" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Hypsurus&#x2F;skod</a><p>Amazing source.

Not specifically &quot;software&quot; but this piece of Haskell code is the most beautiful code I&#x27;ve ever seen:<p><pre><code> quicksort [] = [] quicksort (x:xs) = quicksort [y|y&lt;-xs,y&lt;x] ++ [x] ++ quicksort [y|y&lt;-xs,y&gt;=x]</code></pre>

The HashLife algorithm for Conway’s Game of Life:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hashlife" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hashlife</a><p>My implementations in Literate CoffeeScript:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;recursiveuniver.se" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;recursiveuniver.se</a><p>And JavaScript:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;raganwald.com&#x2F;hashlife" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;raganwald.com&#x2F;hashlife</a>

Camping -- it was _why the lucky stiff&#x27;s Ruby web-microframework, under 4k of code and absolutely brilliant from top to bottom.

This Beauty! I mean that in terms of code aesthetics. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ioccc.org&#x2F;2011&#x2F;eastman&#x2F;eastman.c" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ioccc.org&#x2F;2011&#x2F;eastman&#x2F;eastman.c</a><p>(winner of the 20th International Obfuscated C Code Contest)<p>Nevertheless once you run it, you will have a sweet surprise.

Well, I think Jonathan Blow&#x27;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.

Not working software per se, but I think there&#x27;s a lot of beauty in the way Sandi Metz demos a refactoring of a thing called The Gilded Rose in this video:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE</a>

Early MacPaint and Quickdraw source code is worth a look. Clean and simple, yet solved a rather complex problem. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computerhistory.org&#x2F;atchm&#x2F;macpaint-and-quickdraw-source-code&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computerhistory.org&#x2F;atchm&#x2F;macpaint-and-quickdraw-...</a><p>Here is what the author said about it (and code in general):<p>&quot;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&quot;

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.<p>The same can be said of the PostgreSQL source.

The way ruby uses instance_eval. I didn&#x27;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.

FMOD [1] sound framework provides one of the best C API&#x27;s in industry : stable, works everywhere, clean and beautiful. Please find API example at [2].<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fmod.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fmod.org&#x2F;</a> [2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fmod&#x2F;ue4integration&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;FMODStudio&#x2F;Source&#x2F;FMODStudio&#x2F;Public&#x2F;FMOD&#x2F;fmod.h" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fmod&#x2F;ue4integration&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;FMODStudi...</a>

I&#x27;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.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eurogamer.net&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2016-03-03-a-big-interview-with-chris-sawyer-the-creator-of-rollercoaster-tycoon" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eurogamer.net&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2016-03-03-a-big-interview...</a><p>and<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chrissawyergames.com&#x2F;faq3.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chrissawyergames.com&#x2F;faq3.htm</a>

IPFS<p>Just read through the design, it&#x27;s very simple and extremely modular. It learns the lessons from previous related systems and applies them in the new system.

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.

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

dwm: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dwm.suckless.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dwm.suckless.org&#x2F;</a>

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;suckless.org&#x2F;rocks" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;suckless.org&#x2F;rocks</a>

Joe Armstrong&#x27;s &quot;Universal Server&quot;.

Nobody mentioned git?

I&#x27;ve always found FreeType to be quite wonderful; it integrates the artistry and mathematics of typography with entertaining low-level wizardry.<p>Take a look at the rasterizer, for example: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.savannah.gnu.org&#x2F;cgit&#x2F;freetype&#x2F;freetype2.git&#x2F;tree&#x2F;src&#x2F;raster&#x2F;ftraster.c#n74" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.savannah.gnu.org&#x2F;cgit&#x2F;freetype&#x2F;freetype2.git&#x2F;tree...</a>

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;smile.amazon.com&#x2F;Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-Practice&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0596510047?sa-no-redirect=1" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;smile.amazon.com&#x2F;Beautiful-Code-Leading-Programmers-P...</a><p>This book might help.<p>H&amp;P is great, by the way. It was that book and &quot;Cathedral &amp; The Bazaar&quot; that made me quit a Microsoft-only job and go open-source.

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.

why plan9 hasn&#x27;t come up yet?

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

Kind of out-of-place but Manic Time is the best GUI I remember having used on Windows.<p>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.<p>(plus: there is a working free model and a really useful paid upgrade.)

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8558822" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8558822</a><p>A tiny self-interpreting compiler and virtual machine. The beauty is in how amazingly minimal and yet functional it is.

Why do we assume that software is same as code? I wonder if graphics tools(like photoshop) were&#x27;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..

This is highly opinionated. It will change from person to person, even for the same person in different times of his&#x2F;her life. My answer would be that &quot;when the planets align&quot;: Meaning the right product at the right time.

i maintain a lingering fondness for the [aurora text editor](<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www-personal.umich.edu&#x2F;~knassen&#x2F;aurora.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www-personal.umich.edu&#x2F;~knassen&#x2F;aurora.html</a>), 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.

Apparently Doom 3:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kotaku.com&#x2F;5975610&#x2F;the-exceptional-beauty-of-doom-3s-source-code" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kotaku.com&#x2F;5975610&#x2F;the-exceptional-beauty-of-doom-3s-...</a>

examples:<p>1. a. whitney 2. ioccc.org winners (djb, etc.)<p>what makes [some] software beautiful?<p>the ugliness of other software.<p>most software is large, slow, complicated and bug-ridden.<p>this makes small, fast, clean software written by competent programmers &quot;beautiful&quot;.<p>taste varies. what is too terse and &quot;obfuscated&quot; to some is pleasingly succinct and manageable to others.<p>right now there&#x27;s another post about yann lecun on the front page. he once wrote a lisp-like interpreter that compiles to C called &quot;lush&quot;. of all the lisps i have tried i think it&#x27;s one of the more &quot;beautiful&quot; ones in it&#x27;s design.

qmail and djbdns by D. J. Bernstein. But don&#x27;t take my word for it:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aaronsw.com&#x2F;weblog&#x2F;djb" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aaronsw.com&#x2F;weblog&#x2F;djb</a>

Presto also has a high quality codebase: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;presto" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;presto</a>

Might add that what I&#x27;ve seen of the internals of both Sqeak&#x2F;Pharo Smalltalk and Racket would probably qualify as beautiful software.

Unreal Engine 4<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unrealengine.com&#x2F;ue4-on-github" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unrealengine.com&#x2F;ue4-on-github</a>

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

daisydisk. oh it&#x27;s smooth, harmonious colours, quintessential<p>edit: other comments seem to be from a source code perspective ?

maru lisp by ian piumarta : Maru is a symbolic expression evaluator that can compile its own implementation language.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;piumarta.com&#x2F;software&#x2F;maru&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;piumarta.com&#x2F;software&#x2F;maru&#x2F;</a>

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

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

djb servers are really beautiful. Built securely from the ground up, with very little attack surface area.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thedjbway.b0llix.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thedjbway.b0llix.net&#x2F;</a>

Erlang Virtual Machine - It&#x27;s an amazing piece of software

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

If you mean applications, Adobe Illustrator<p>If you mean code, Smalltalk or LISP

bspwm [0] + sxhkd [1]<p><pre><code> [0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;baskerville&#x2F;bspwm [1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;baskerville&#x2F;sxhkd</code></pre>

Ruby on Rails. It&#x27;s literally beautiful.

I&#x27;m a big fan of SqlAlchemy for python.

Let&#x27;s make an OS out of that thread.

Emacs

Anything written in Perl.

Kay&#x27;s power tools

IDTECH[0-9]+<p>shameless fanboy here

vim

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

There is a few rather universal generalizations about most of these projects people find beautiful - <i>the code has been written after throughout understanding of what one is doing and why</i> - the domain, the first principles, the logic and the representation. And then one <i>returns</i> and refines (refactors) the code several times as long as one&#x27;s understanding clarifies in the process of writing it down.<p>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.<p>&quot;My code is my documentation&quot;, or auto-generated &quot;documentation&quot; is bullshit for the same reasons.

TeX and Metafont. It&#x27;d be hard to find anything even matching these gems.

<p><pre><code> nginx&#x2F;src&#x2F;core&#x2F;*</code></pre>

It&#x27;s funny to read what people think are beautiful apps here.<p>IMHO, the most beautiful software are always games and entertainment titles... After all that is the purpose.<p>Office 2013? It&#x27;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...<p>I can use it for creating beautiful PowerPoint and excel spreadsheets.<p>Code is never &#x27;beautiful&#x27;. It&#x27;s either concise, well-written and formatted well, or it isn&#x27;t.