Programming

For software to be perfect, can not be improved no matter what, you'd have to define a very specific and narrow scope and evaluate against that.

Environments change, text and data encoding and content changes, forms and protocol of input and output changes, opportunities and wishes to integrate or extend change.

pwd seems simple enough. cd I would already say no, with opportunities to remember folders, support globbing, fuzzy matching, history, virtual filesystems. Many of those depend on the environment you're in. Typically, shells handle globbing. There's alternative cd tools that do fuzzy matching and history, and virtual filesystems are usually abstracted away. But things change. And I would certainly like an interactive and fuzzy cd.

Now, if you define it's scope, you can say: "All that other stuff is out of scope. It's perfect within it's defined target scope." But I don't know if that's what you're looking for? It certainly doesn't mean it can't be improved no matter what.

I wanted to say VLC because to me, it's the gold standard of fully working open-source software that just destroys the commercial competitors.

But it's not perfect only because society changes. New video formats forces VLC and open-source devs to adapt. Bigger video and new tech specs require VLC to update. If it wasn't for all those external needs, VLC would be perfect.

Did I also mentioned the many times rich companies wanted to buy VLC and they laughed?

emacs can only be improved no matter what but it should count

Htop

Idk if it's perfect but I really like the "literate programming" version of `

This is not the original, but here is one version of it : https://github.com/zyedidia/Literate/blob/master/examples/wc.lit

A program that just prints "Hello World" to the screen and quits.

mcmaster.com is pretty close...

Winamp! It probably had some bugs or security issues but functional it was perfect imo.

Does IRC count ?

Honestly, it all starts going to shite after "hello world."

There was a moment in time where maybe it was qmail:

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

Ten years after the launch of qmail 1.0, and at a time when more than a million of the Internet’s SMTP servers ran either qmail or netqmail, only four known bugs had been found in the qmail 1.0 releases, and no security issues.

More on how it was accomplished:

https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/01/17/some-thoughts-on-security-after-ten-years-of-qmail-1-0/

TeX. Best documented source, and last bug found was 12 years ago.

The flight software for the Apollo moonshots.

wget.

You may be interested by this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification.

Prominent examples of verified software systems include the CompCert verified C compiler and the seL4 high-assurance operating system kernel.

7zip?

Automotive engine control computers.

They just work, for decades and millions of miles.

Of course: https://github.com/kelseyhightower/nocode

No; since every user defines the perfect program differently. Which should be the default behaviour(s)?

Is there a perfect building?

Probably not, since they exist in an environment — which is constantly changing — and are used by people — whose needs are constantly changing.

The same is true of software. Yes, programs consist of math which has objective qualities. But in order to execute in the physical world, they have to make certain assumptions which can always be invalidated.

Consider fast inverse sqrt: maybe perfect, for the time, for specific uses, on specific hardware? Probably not perfect for today.

TempleOS

I don't think such thing as perfect software exist, only abandoned software. If the environment changes, then the software needs changes too.

Logic gates?

Notepad.exe, pre-windows 11. Now it's something else entirely but still uses the name :(