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

Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software? by mikewarot on Monday May 02, 2022 @01:29AM (#31231738)

Turbo Vision/Turbo Pascal for MS-DOS. Borland put together one of the best instances of an object oriented library that just worked. The follow up with Delphi for Windows was the most productive environment I have ever experienced, until I was priced out of it in their pivot to "Enterprise" customers.

Nothing since is anywhere near as productive. Lazarus is ok, but the documentation is horrible, (almost non-existent, only doc-strings in many cases) which makes the system far less useful.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software? by munificent on Monday May 02, 2022 @04:06PM (#31240201)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software? by gwbas1c on Monday May 02, 2022 @05:17PM (#31241042)

> C# was a beautiful language

It still is. (And Blazor is pretty cool, too.)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software? by munificent on Monday May 02, 2022 @06:15PM (#31241715)

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

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software? by arwhatever on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @02:47AM (#31245432)

Every UI technology is unbearably cumbersome after starting my career in WinForms.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software? by rlf_dev on Monday May 02, 2022 @02:20PM (#31238798)

It's been an absolute joy toying with TV after all this years for some TUI side-projects.

https://github.com/magiblot/tvision

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software? by spacemanmatt on Monday May 02, 2022 @08:16AM (#31234128)

I cut my teeth on Borland Pascal and later launched my career with Borland C/C++ tools. I love JetBrains these days but not as much as I remember loving Borland!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software? by archielc on Monday May 02, 2022 @04:37PM (#31240579)

There's Lazarus project (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/) - which is a Delphi compatible IDE. I've used it once to build a simple UI app, and it was a real nostalgic look back in time. Not to mention that it was extremely simple to build the app.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software? by legalcorrection on Monday May 02, 2022 @01:46PM (#31238362)

I never used those older environments, but I've heard that Windows Forms + C# captures most of the same magic. Do you disagree?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software? by CodesInChaos on Monday May 02, 2022 @04:45PM (#31240685)

WinForms did, it's extremely similar to Delphi's VCL. Microsoft's even changing newer UI libraries do not.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software? by nottorp on Monday May 02, 2022 @05:01PM (#31240880)

They stole Delphi's designer from Borland (not sure if it had already renamed or not) and that fixed things for a while. It didn't last though.

[ Parent | on HN ]