4 ms·

Uxn is interesting as an art project, but it's not really practical to use by anyone besides its own creator.

eternityforest 2y ago
It's not something I'd want to actually use, but it seems like many others enjoy it. As an art piece it's pretty impressive just because of how completely different their perspective on computing is, and how it blends with their ideas on life. It reminds me a lot of FORTH culture.
mhd 2y ago
I wouldn't go that far, as there are already a bunch of people using it. As always, there's a spectrum between mass consumption and purely individual environments. It's just that as an industry, we've never been that much oriented towards the "mass" end since personal computing started. You basically pick one of two or three IDEs, and as a prize get to customize your color scheme… There's still a not-quite-niche amount of e.g. (neo-)vim or Emacs users who have highly customized environments, and often not just by composing various third party elements, but also writing a lot of extension and glue code. And of course on the other end, you've got people who wrote their own editors and other daily apps, often encouraged by constraints - forth environments in embedded situations (Chuck Moore's ColorForth being a good example), or Windows without "POSIX escape hatches", where there's a lot of handwritten tools in C/C++. I'm a bit saddened about how little one knows of this, which brings us back to art: Just like we're never getting to see the unique paintings some Belgrad plumber is doing in their attic, we're also never getting to see the dozens of Rexx scripts that work for some IBM mainframe programmer for decades. A lot of the "alternative" environments are less practical. But they are joyful to their users, which is a part of user experience (or, well, human experience) we shouldn't neglect. Performative minimalism is probably one of the bigger ones amongst the readers of this forum.

It's not something I'd want to actually use, but it seems like many others enjoy it. As an art piece it's pretty impressive just because of how completely different their perspective on computing is, and how it blends with their ideas on life. It reminds me a lot of FORTH culture.

mhd 2y ago

I wouldn't go that far, as there are already a bunch of people using it. As always, there's a spectrum between mass consumption and purely individual environments. It's just that as an industry, we've never been that much oriented towards the "mass" end since personal computing started. You basically pick one of two or three IDEs, and as a prize get to customize your color scheme… There's still a not-quite-niche amount of e.g. (neo-)vim or Emacs users who have highly customized environments, and often not just by composing various third party elements, but also writing a lot of extension and glue code. And of course on the other end, you've got people who wrote their own editors and other daily apps, often encouraged by constraints - forth environments in embedded situations (Chuck Moore's ColorForth being a good example), or Windows without "POSIX escape hatches", where there's a lot of handwritten tools in C/C++. I'm a bit saddened about how little one knows of this, which brings us back to art: Just like we're never getting to see the unique paintings some Belgrad plumber is doing in their attic, we're also never getting to see the dozens of Rexx scripts that work for some IBM mainframe programmer for decades. A lot of the "alternative" environments are less practical. But they are joyful to their users, which is a part of user experience (or, well, human experience) we shouldn't neglect. Performative minimalism is probably one of the bigger ones amongst the readers of this forum.