Re:Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
by cjtoth on Saturday November 27, 2021 @01:29PM
(#29362224)
It feels pretty disingenuous to write off all real world design as trivial or impossible to make an impression. For instance, aluminum cans are a great example of quality design
Re:Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
by erezsh on Monday November 29, 2021 @02:01PM
(#29383739)
I'll rephrase it - programming is the only field I know deeply enough to be deeply impressed by the accomplishments I'm seeing.
I'm sure I interact with well designed entities all the time, without even knowing it. One of the properties of really good design, imho, is that it's not meant to be easy to notice.
Python is still the best-designed language I ever used, warts and all. It's often grouped with Javascript because they're both interpreted and "duck-typed", but imho the gap between them is huge.
Svelte is amazing for UI logic. It makes hard things feel easy and simple, and really hard things to feel possible.
QBasic was a horrible language, but its IDE (if you can call it that) was incredibly helpful for beginners. Maybe I'm nostalgic, but I never experienced such helpful hand-holding in programming ever since.
Sorry it's all about programming. Most real world design is either too trivial or too impossible to make an impression.