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> wirth was the greatest remaining apostle of simplicity, correctness, and software built for humans to understand; And yet far from the last. Simple, correct,

> wirth was the greatest remaining apostle of simplicity, correctness, and software built for humans to understand; And yet far from the last. Simple, correct, and beautiful software is still being made today. Most of it goes unnoticed, its quiet song drowned out by the cacophony of attention-seeking, complex, brittle behemoths that top the charts. That song never faded, you just need to tune in.

kragen 3y ago
who are today's new great minimalists?
- rollcat 3y ago
  In no particular order: 100r.co, OpenBSD (& its many individual contributors such as tedu or JCS), Suckless/9front, sr.ht, Alpine, Gemini (&gopher) & all the people you can find there, Low Tech Magazine, antirez, Fabrice Bellard, Virgil Dupras (CollapseOS), & many other people, communities, and projects - sorry I don't have a single comprehensive list, that's just off the top of my head ;)
  - kragen 3y ago
    i... really don't think kris de decker is on niklaus wirth's level. i don't think he can write so much as fizzbuzz fabrice bellard is wirth-level, it's true. not sure about tedu and jcs, because i'm not familiar enough with their work. it's absurd to compare most of the others to wirth and hoare you're comparing kindergarten finger paintings to da vinci you said wirth was "far from the last" apostle of simplicity. definition of apostle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostle
    - rollcat 3y ago
      > it's absurd to compare most of the others to wirth and hoare You're the one trying to directly compare achievement, not me. If you're looking for top achievers, I'd have to name PHP or systemd, and THAT would be out of place ;) I even said "in no particular order", because I don't think any two can be easily compared. My main criterion for inclusion was the drive for simplifying technology, and publishing these efforts: > An apostle [...], in its literal sense, is an emissary. The word is [...] literally "one who is sent off" [...]. The purpose of such sending off is usually to convey a message, and thus "messenger" is a common alternative translation. Every single project, person, or community I've named here has some form of web page, blog, RSS feed, papers/presentations, and/or source code, that serve to carry their messages. Achievement can be measured, simplicity can only be appreciated.
  - amatecha 3y ago
    uxn ftw <3
    - kragen 3y ago
      uxn is cool but it's definitely not the same kind of achievement as oberon, pascal, quicksort, forth, and structured programming; rek and devine would surely not claim it was
      - amatecha 3y ago
        to quote gp, "beautiful software is still being made today". It's not a competition.
        kragen 3y ago
        you don't get to be described as an 'apostle of simplicity' just because you like simplicity. you have to actually change the world by creating simplicity. devine and rek are still a long way from a turing award
        amatecha 3y ago
        you don't get to dictate who does or doesn't get recognized for creating awesome works that influence and inspire others. take your persistent negativity elsewhere. btw, uxn is absolutely the exemplification of "software built for humans to understand" and simplicity. I mean... > the resulting programs are succinct and translate well to pen & paper computing. > to make any one program available on a new platform, the emulator is the only piece of code that will need to be modified, which is explicitly designed to be easily implemented https://100r.co/site/uxn_design.html https://100r.co/site/uxn_design.html how one can frame this as trivial is beyond me.
        kragen 3y ago
        i don't think uxn is trivial, i think it's a first step toward something great. it definitely isn't the exemplification of "software built for humans to understand"; you have to program it in assembly language, and a stack-based assembly language at that. in that sense it's closer to brainfuck than to hypertalk or excel or oberon. it falls short of its goal of working well on small computers (say, under a megabyte of ram and under a mips) the bit you quote about uxn having a standard virtual machine to permit easy ports to new platforms is from wirth's 01965 paper on euler http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/euler-2/ http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/euler-2/; it isn't something devine and rek invented, and it may not have been something wirth invented either. schorre's 01963 paper on meta-ii targets a machine-independent 'fictitious machine' but it's not turing-complete and it's not clear if he intended it to be implemented by interpretation rather than, say, assembler macros i suggest that if you develop more tolerance for opinions that differ from your own, instead of deprecating them as 'persistent negativity' and 'dictating', you will learn more rapidly, because other people know things you don't, and sometimes that is why our opinions differ. sometimes those things we know that you don't are even correct i think this is one of those cases. what i said, that you were disagreeing with, was that uxn was not the same kind of achievement as oberon, pascal, quicksort, forth, and structured programming (and, let me clarify, a much less significant achievement) and that it is a long way from [meriting] a turing award. i don't see how anyone could possibly disagree with that, or gloss it as 'uxn is trivial', as you did, unless they don't know what those things are i am pretty sure that if you ask devine what he thinks about this comment, you will find that he agrees with every word in it
  - nextos 3y ago
    I'd also mention https://www.piumarta.com https://www.piumarta.com
    - kragen 3y ago
      ooh, yeah, now that's a possibility
  - johndoe0815 3y ago
    I would add Jochen Liedtke (unfortunately he passed away already more than 20 years ago) as inventor of the L4 microkernel. Several research groups continued work on L4 after Liedtke's death (Hermann Härtig in Dresden, Gernot Heiser in Sydney, a bit of research at Frank Bellosa's group in Karlsruhe and more industrial research on L4 for embedded/RT systems by Robert Kaiser, later a professor in Wiesbaden), but I would still argue that Liedtke's original work was the most influential, though all the formal verification work in Sydney also had significant impact - but that was only enabled by the simplicity of the underlying microkernel concepts and implementations.
    - kragen 3y ago
      agreed, though i think l4 was more influential than eumel (which is free software now by the way) even though eumel preceded l4
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  I use Suckless's terminal, st. It's great. To install it, I compile it from source. It takes a couple seconds. Take a look at their work.
  - kragen 3y ago
    do you think writing st is an achievement that merits a turing award because i've also written a terminal emulator, and it compiles from source in 0.98 seconds https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/admu-shell.c https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/admu-she... screenshot of running vi in it at https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/admu_shell.png https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/admu_she... (steps to reproduce: install dependencies; make; rm admu-shell admu-shell-fb admu-shell-wercam admu admu.o admu-shell.o admu_tv_typewriter.o; time make -j. it only takes 0.37 seconds if you only make -j admu-shell and don't build the other executables. measured on debian 12.1 on a ryzen 5 3500u) i wrote pretty much all of it on october 12 and 13 of 02018 so forgive me if i don't think that writing a terminal emulator without scrollback is an achievement comparable to pascal and oberon etc. not even if it were as great as st (and actually admu sucks more than st, but it can still run vi and screen)
    - vidarh 3y ago
      Last I checked, st was around 8k lines. It's not bad (xterm's scrollbar and button handling is in a similar LOC range), but I'd argue it's not minimalist, so even if writing a terminal had qualified, st isn't it. WRT to the scrollback it seems like they're going overboard in being difficult about features that adds little code but has much impact, while not paying close attention to their dependencies. Things they could've done without (the copy on my system includes libz, libpng, libexpat (assuming for fontconfig, which is itself a giant steaming pile of excessive complexity), and even libbrotlicommon... I'm pretty sure I have no brotli images on my system that st has any business touching... I used st until I replaced it with my own, and I can't fault it for many things in terms of usability, though. Other than the box drawing - it's not pixel perfect (I only bring that up because I bikeshedded a pixel-perfect override for the boxdrawing characters for my font renderer when I was bored a while back so it's the one place where I can crow about mine being better than st ;) - in every other area it still has warts to clean up)
- jonjacky 3y ago
  Kartik Agaram [1], The paper about his Mu project [2] presents a rationale for a particular kind of minimalism, and its realization. 1. https://akkartik.name https://akkartik.name 2. https://akkartik.name/akkartik-convivial-20200315.pdf https://akkartik.name/akkartik-convivial-20200315.pdf

kragen 3y ago

who are today's new great minimalists?

rollcat 3y ago
In no particular order: 100r.co, OpenBSD (& its many individual contributors such as tedu or JCS), Suckless/9front, sr.ht, Alpine, Gemini (&gopher) & all the people you can find there, Low Tech Magazine, antirez, Fabrice Bellard, Virgil Dupras (CollapseOS), & many other people, communities, and projects - sorry I don't have a single comprehensive list, that's just off the top of my head ;)
- kragen 3y ago
  i... really don't think kris de decker is on niklaus wirth's level. i don't think he can write so much as fizzbuzz fabrice bellard is wirth-level, it's true. not sure about tedu and jcs, because i'm not familiar enough with their work. it's absurd to compare most of the others to wirth and hoare you're comparing kindergarten finger paintings to da vinci you said wirth was "far from the last" apostle of simplicity. definition of apostle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostle
  - rollcat 3y ago
    > it's absurd to compare most of the others to wirth and hoare You're the one trying to directly compare achievement, not me. If you're looking for top achievers, I'd have to name PHP or systemd, and THAT would be out of place ;) I even said "in no particular order", because I don't think any two can be easily compared. My main criterion for inclusion was the drive for simplifying technology, and publishing these efforts: > An apostle [...], in its literal sense, is an emissary. The word is [...] literally "one who is sent off" [...]. The purpose of such sending off is usually to convey a message, and thus "messenger" is a common alternative translation. Every single project, person, or community I've named here has some form of web page, blog, RSS feed, papers/presentations, and/or source code, that serve to carry their messages. Achievement can be measured, simplicity can only be appreciated.
- amatecha 3y ago
  uxn ftw <3
  - kragen 3y ago
    uxn is cool but it's definitely not the same kind of achievement as oberon, pascal, quicksort, forth, and structured programming; rek and devine would surely not claim it was
    - amatecha 3y ago
      to quote gp, "beautiful software is still being made today". It's not a competition.
      - kragen 3y ago
        you don't get to be described as an 'apostle of simplicity' just because you like simplicity. you have to actually change the world by creating simplicity. devine and rek are still a long way from a turing award
        amatecha 3y ago
        you don't get to dictate who does or doesn't get recognized for creating awesome works that influence and inspire others. take your persistent negativity elsewhere. btw, uxn is absolutely the exemplification of "software built for humans to understand" and simplicity. I mean... > the resulting programs are succinct and translate well to pen & paper computing. > to make any one program available on a new platform, the emulator is the only piece of code that will need to be modified, which is explicitly designed to be easily implemented https://100r.co/site/uxn_design.html https://100r.co/site/uxn_design.html how one can frame this as trivial is beyond me.
        kragen 3y ago
        i don't think uxn is trivial, i think it's a first step toward something great. it definitely isn't the exemplification of "software built for humans to understand"; you have to program it in assembly language, and a stack-based assembly language at that. in that sense it's closer to brainfuck than to hypertalk or excel or oberon. it falls short of its goal of working well on small computers (say, under a megabyte of ram and under a mips) the bit you quote about uxn having a standard virtual machine to permit easy ports to new platforms is from wirth's 01965 paper on euler http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/euler-2/ http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/euler-2/; it isn't something devine and rek invented, and it may not have been something wirth invented either. schorre's 01963 paper on meta-ii targets a machine-independent 'fictitious machine' but it's not turing-complete and it's not clear if he intended it to be implemented by interpretation rather than, say, assembler macros i suggest that if you develop more tolerance for opinions that differ from your own, instead of deprecating them as 'persistent negativity' and 'dictating', you will learn more rapidly, because other people know things you don't, and sometimes that is why our opinions differ. sometimes those things we know that you don't are even correct i think this is one of those cases. what i said, that you were disagreeing with, was that uxn was not the same kind of achievement as oberon, pascal, quicksort, forth, and structured programming (and, let me clarify, a much less significant achievement) and that it is a long way from [meriting] a turing award. i don't see how anyone could possibly disagree with that, or gloss it as 'uxn is trivial', as you did, unless they don't know what those things are i am pretty sure that if you ask devine what he thinks about this comment, you will find that he agrees with every word in it
- nextos 3y ago
  I'd also mention https://www.piumarta.com https://www.piumarta.com
  - kragen 3y ago
    ooh, yeah, now that's a possibility
- johndoe0815 3y ago
  I would add Jochen Liedtke (unfortunately he passed away already more than 20 years ago) as inventor of the L4 microkernel. Several research groups continued work on L4 after Liedtke's death (Hermann Härtig in Dresden, Gernot Heiser in Sydney, a bit of research at Frank Bellosa's group in Karlsruhe and more industrial research on L4 for embedded/RT systems by Robert Kaiser, later a professor in Wiesbaden), but I would still argue that Liedtke's original work was the most influential, though all the formal verification work in Sydney also had significant impact - but that was only enabled by the simplicity of the underlying microkernel concepts and implementations.
  - kragen 3y ago
    agreed, though i think l4 was more influential than eumel (which is free software now by the way) even though eumel preceded l4
ryukoposting 3y ago
I use Suckless's terminal, st. It's great. To install it, I compile it from source. It takes a couple seconds. Take a look at their work.
- kragen 3y ago
  do you think writing st is an achievement that merits a turing award because i've also written a terminal emulator, and it compiles from source in 0.98 seconds https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/admu-shell.c https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/admu-she... screenshot of running vi in it at https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/admu_shell.png https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/admu_she... (steps to reproduce: install dependencies; make; rm admu-shell admu-shell-fb admu-shell-wercam admu admu.o admu-shell.o admu_tv_typewriter.o; time make -j. it only takes 0.37 seconds if you only make -j admu-shell and don't build the other executables. measured on debian 12.1 on a ryzen 5 3500u) i wrote pretty much all of it on october 12 and 13 of 02018 so forgive me if i don't think that writing a terminal emulator without scrollback is an achievement comparable to pascal and oberon etc. not even if it were as great as st (and actually admu sucks more than st, but it can still run vi and screen)
  - vidarh 3y ago
    Last I checked, st was around 8k lines. It's not bad (xterm's scrollbar and button handling is in a similar LOC range), but I'd argue it's not minimalist, so even if writing a terminal had qualified, st isn't it. WRT to the scrollback it seems like they're going overboard in being difficult about features that adds little code but has much impact, while not paying close attention to their dependencies. Things they could've done without (the copy on my system includes libz, libpng, libexpat (assuming for fontconfig, which is itself a giant steaming pile of excessive complexity), and even libbrotlicommon... I'm pretty sure I have no brotli images on my system that st has any business touching... I used st until I replaced it with my own, and I can't fault it for many things in terms of usability, though. Other than the box drawing - it's not pixel perfect (I only bring that up because I bikeshedded a pixel-perfect override for the boxdrawing characters for my font renderer when I was bored a while back so it's the one place where I can crow about mine being better than st ;) - in every other area it still has warts to clean up)
jonjacky 3y ago
Kartik Agaram [1], The paper about his Mu project [2] presents a rationale for a particular kind of minimalism, and its realization. 1. https://akkartik.name https://akkartik.name 2. https://akkartik.name/akkartik-convivial-20200315.pdf https://akkartik.name/akkartik-convivial-20200315.pdf