Don Hopkins

Exactly, at the risk of repeating the same word that many other sibling comments begin with.

After Drupalgeddon, I signed up for Medium and started migrating my content from my site https://donhopkins.com to Medium, because I was tired of sinking time into maintaining my own blog.

I loved the simplicity of the interface and how nice it looked.

But it felt like Medium's goals were at cross purposes to what I wanted to use it for.

I just wanted to make my content easily accessible to the maximum number of people, and I was willing to pay a monthly fee for that. I have no interest in making money off of it.

But Medium seems to be designed for people who want to get rich quick, and the devil's contract that I entered into was that because I wanted to make money of of Medium, that gave them the right to make money off of me, and of course their pursuit of making money off of me overwhelmed my presumed desire to make money off of them unless I played their clickbait pyramid scheme, and even then were I to monetize my own content at the expense of people being able to read it, all I'd get was chump change, so monetization simply wasn't worth it to me.

I'd rather pay more in exchange for freedom from the feeling of being treated like a prostitute by an exploitive pimp.

I got the distinct feeling that Medium's promotion algorithms not just ignored me but actually had disdain for me, because I wasn't playing their monetization game.

If I write an article about ray tracing lime…

I've worked on two user interface systems that used on constraints and data binding for layout and configuration, which worked very well.

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/69

Constraints and Prototypes in Garnet and Laszlo

Garnet is an advanced user interface development environment written in Common Lisp, developed by Brad Meyers (the author of the article). I worked for Brad on the Garnet project at the CMU CS department back in 1992-3.

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~garnet/

One thing I like about Brad Meyers is that he's a strong programmer, as well as an excellent researcher, so he had a first-hand understanding of the real-world issues involved in programming languages and user interface architecture, unlike many academics who talk a lot of theory but never get their hands dirty. Brad Meyers understands where the rubber hits the road, and how important it is to have good tires.

At the time I worked on it, Garnet didn't have pretty graphics like Flash, but the underlying programming system had some advanced features that are sorely lacking from most modern user interface development environments.

Laszlo is an modern open source GUI programming system, with many of Garnet's advanced "natural programming" features like prototypes and constraints. Laszlo currently uses Flash as its virtual machine, but it's a much higher level way to program dynamic interactive web based applications, without using the proprietary Flash authoring…

I love emergent behaviour and story telling. Anyone who has played City builders like Sim City or roguelikes like Dwarf Fortress knows how interesting, fun and even informative they can be.

In a world where setting them up and letting rogue agents run rampant becomes relatively low cost and fast, I think focusing on the desired outcomes, the story telling and specially the UX for the human user, is key and maybe we can take some learnings from Will Wright on "Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games" [1].

I'm going to be unable to do much this weekend so I can't say I'll try check this out (yet?) but I'd be interested in your own experiences so far. Any surprises? Things you'd like to do next? What's most fun/challenging?

An actual report/writeup will probably resonate more than a repo for people who can't check it out easily or are not willing to.

- [1] https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d

Nice! You probably know of this link "Get started making music"[0] and I found it pretty cool.

What do you think of "The Sims Game Design Documents"[1]? Could you recommend other similar resources?

I guess what really strikes a chord with me is the arc, not only "in" the game, but of the journey to make the game. One book I enjoyed on an emotional level was "The Making of Prince of Persia"[2] by Jordan Mechner. I also enjoyed "Masters of Doom"[3] by David Kushner, but more on the merit of good research, which I really respect. I don't want a montage, I want the story with the suffering and tribulations.

Do you know of similar content?

[0]: https://learningmusic.ableton.com/

[1]: https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments/

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Prince-Persia-Journals-1985-1993-Illustrated/dp/0578627310

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Culture/dp/0812972155

Oh my! We spent a fair bit of time playing this on my friend's PCjr in 1986 or so. My main problem with text adventures was interface discovery. What precise verb or noun is the parser looking for?

The first one I recall playing was Adventure for Logo on the C64. Don Hopkins has a great writeup about it here: https://donhopkins.medium.com/logo-adventure-for-c64-terrapin-logo-4c684a240b53 This article would have blown my mind and changed my world when I was 6. After Adventure, I always wanted to write my own text adventures. The first programs I wrote in c64 basic when I was 6-10 attempted to accomplish this, but I had very little concept of how to write a parser.

“This guy” is Don Hopkins who, amongst a long list of achievements in the field of computer science specializing in human computer interaction and computer graphics, is one of the authors of the UNIX haters handbook - specifically the extremely prescient chapter 7 "The X-Windows Disaster", published when Linux was in its infancy. You don't have to like what he is saying, but he has decades of experience and research behind what he says. Know where your field came from. The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward - sadly something a vocal minority of the community refuses to do.

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/resume.html