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A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

trevoragilbert.com

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Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#71

Post by mtnygard »

julianeon wrote: post #13

The biggest incentive to lock down wasn't listed. It's economic. If you can guide, or shoehorn, people into using your service, and it's 'good enough,' you can make a lot more money than if you're doing custom one-offs for everyone, or writing a bunch of potentially buggy code for different variations, or having your team troubleshoot integrations. An important point too is that, if one person sees another person usi…

I've long believed this to be the reason that component-oriented software never went anywhere back in the 90's. You could make _some_ money selling components. But you could make _tons_ of money selling a walled-off set of pre-integrated components as an office suite.

Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#72

Post by igouy »

jfoutz wrote: post #32
0xpgm wrote: post #30

I'm currently playing with Pharo Smalltalk and everything is very accessible. I wonder why Smalltalk Environments did not catch on as operating systems, let alone just as languages, where everything can be tinkered with and modified on the fly. Apple sounds like the kind of company that would successfully build a smalltalk device, yet they go the opposite way of locking down their devices hard.

Version control. Small talk is amazing, but dumping the binary to distribute is so scary. Did I unload my email client? Are my credentials in there? Gah. Scary.

> dumping the binary to distribute is so scary

So don't.

Build a reproducible distribution image from a base image + fileIn source code.

https://cuis-smalltalk.github.io/TheCuisBook/Daily-Workflow....

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mastering_ENVY_Develope...

Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#73

Post by igouy »

0xpgm wrote: post #30

I'm currently playing with Pharo Smalltalk and everything is very accessible. I wonder why Smalltalk Environments did not catch on as operating systems, let alone just as languages, where everything can be tinkered with and modified on the fly. Apple sounds like the kind of company that would successfully build a smalltalk device, yet they go the opposite way of locking down their devices hard.

Many many more people want / need to use something than want / need to tinker.

Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#74

Post by tl »

ehnto wrote: post #18
teucris wrote: post #15

I think there’s a bit of survivorship bias in the tech industry. Many of us got into tech because we were able to explore computers with few limitations. But I’m not convinced it was mostly due to the tech of the 90s being more open. We are the ones who did that kind of stuff, so we’re a filtered audience posting on HN about tinkerable software. We likely tinkered for a lot of reasons that didn’t have much to do what…

Software is plenty tinkerable now, especially with so much of it being open source. Though applications rarely are, I don't know if that was all that different back then either for most people. edit: I think I misunderstood your last paragraph to mean we'll need to keep low level skills available so we don't lose the knowledge. I think you actually meant that we don't currently understand what the next generation wil…

> Though applications rarely are, I don't know if that was all that different back then either for most people.

It was. Another commenter mentioned ResEdit and being able to tinker with classic Mac applications. Two things were universally true back then:

1. In a pre-internet world, the entire application had to be hackable in some fashion, even if the application's creator tried to make that difficult.

2. Most parts of an application boiled down to simple text files, simple binary layouts or compiled source code. Obfuscation, encryption or even compression all cost CPU cycles which were often too previous of a resource.

As an example, Civilization stored much of its data in *.txt files you could edit in notepad to change the strength of units, etc...

The author's piece refers to the ability to inspect web documents to see how markup works. This is an order of magnitude harder to do in mobile apps often providing the same functionality.

Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#75

Post by steve_adams_86 »

mhitza wrote: post #9
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of obfuscation seen these days isn’t about security, but is a side effect of minifying code (which usually is worthwhile).

While there is a slight difference that can add up (if text assets bandwith factor well into your traffic), I prefer to push out brotli compressed unminified js/css nowadays. Makes it easier to understand JS issues on prod as well.

You might be aware already but you can set up monitoring services which host your source maps (you can deploy versioned source maps to the service when your deploy your code), so you can get errors in the monitoring app which are pinned to the correct parts of your source code. It's a bit of legwork and complexity, but useful if you already use something like sentry. If you don't, what you're doing is likely a better solution.

Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#77

Post by jfoutz »

igouy wrote: post #72
jfoutz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Version control. Small talk is amazing, but dumping the binary to distribute is so scary. Did I unload my email client? Are my credentials in there? Gah. Scary.

> dumping the binary to distribute is so scary So don't. Build a reproducible distribution image from a base image + fileIn source code. https://cuis-smalltalk.github.io/TheCuisBook/Daily-Workflow.... https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mastering_ENVY_Develope...

That's awesome! Thanks!

I haven't messed around with smalltalk since squeak, around the dabble-db days. I was uncomfortable with the montachello (I think?) diff system. Maybe I'll have to give it another spin the next time I get a good long break.

Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#78

Post by vitiral »

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #10
vitiral wrote: post #3

let's start over. You might like civboot.org

In case anyone's curious: I didn't recognize the .org domain but I felt lucky, punk, and followed it. civboot.org redirected me to https://github.com/civboot/civboot which I totally would feel comfortable visiting :)

Ya, I'll have a website eventually...

What do you have against .org websites?

Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#79

Post by 0xpgm »

igouy wrote: post #73
0xpgm wrote: post #30

I'm currently playing with Pharo Smalltalk and everything is very accessible. I wonder why Smalltalk Environments did not catch on as operating systems, let alone just as languages, where everything can be tinkered with and modified on the fly. Apple sounds like the kind of company that would successfully build a smalltalk device, yet they go the opposite way of locking down their devices hard.

Many many more people want / need to use something than want / need to tinker.

An environment that makes it very easy to tinker will produce more potential creators resulting in more things to use

Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#80

Post by igouy »

0xpgm wrote: post #79
igouy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many many more people want / need to use something than want / need to tinker.

An environment that makes it very easy to tinker will produce more potential creators resulting in more things to use

Maybe; maybe not.

I have experienced working with people who seemed far more interested in tinkering with the Smalltalk IDE than work on the mundane tasks needed to complete the project. They preferred tinkering to work ;-)

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