Liam Proven writes about operating systems, lean software, Linux and BSD history, desktop environments and old computers.
HN links it for retro computing and OS history, and a commenter cites his lean software views against bloated, over-designed systems.
I'm a Vim user and I've made this point when I rail against IDEs; it's even on the front page today [0]: "5. The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built."
I think I agree, but I think there are a lot of things you could say about this. What if you're just starting out and you don't know how to efficiently design systems? What if you work in an industry of people under 40 (under 30?) who by definition can't have the kind of experience that would let you design small systems? What if you work for a company that doesn't want to give you the time to figure it out? What if you have a competitor that's just shipping trash and forcing you out of the market with a "we'll clean up the tech debt later" mentality? How do we make tools that are powerful enough to enable us to do hard things, but wise enough to keep us from doing foolish things? Should we rely on our tools to do this? Is this an argument against centralization? Isn't that deeply inefficient?
Honestly I struggle with this all the time. I've got the outlines of some ideas and there are some tech communities grappling with the same issues, but I think we're just at the very beginning of a rethink about how we do software.
[0]: https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/88032.html
> One interesting turn on the ST side was the creation of from-scratch GEM implementations.
Oh yes indeed. I was on the edge of the FreeGEM project: I did some bug-fixing, documentation, translation, and stuff like that. I ended up learning a lot about the history of ST GEM, and one aspect was how its cleanly-layered design let people just re-implement bits and plug them back into the original.
Which is what led to FreeMINT and TOS 4, and the desire for a FOSS distro of that is what led to AFROS.
> You can even run MagiC on Linux now
Oh! I knew he'd open-sourced it. I did mention MagiC in passing in my follow-up to Nemanja's history:
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/96552.html
I didn't realise there had been recent activity. I must try it. Thank you!