> tinker-friendly [...] complexity. Some [...] necessary. Much of it is not, and is just heaps & heaps of technologies / abstraction layers & legacy cruft.
Nod. That silly only-on-my-own laptop project had a device-driver->full-screen-browser stack, so "Reimplementing wheels - sigh. But no libinput, linux gesture mess, window managers, xlib/wayland, ... - oh dancing-lightly-through-tulips yay!".
I enjoyed lisp machines, which handled complexity differently. DonHopkins comments on a LispM ergonomics thread:[1] "It was not just the hardware, or the software, or the culture, or the interesting problems you could solve, or the zeitgeist of that time in history, but a rich combination of all those things and more, that is so hard to capture, describe or reproduce -- or even believe, if you haven't experienced it first hand. [] Those giant keyboards, with all their wide special purpose buttons topped with hieroglyphic keycap labels, in combination with the huge screen, three button mouse, and of course all the great software turning on and off the little dots on the screen that you could dive into, explore and modify at will, the printed and online documentation, the networked developer support community, all carefully designed to work together seamlessly regardless of cost, gave you the feeling of being in control of a very heavy, expensive, well built, solid, powerful, luxury automobile, with rich [...]".
I guess I was wondering if hardware-wise, part of what allows pico-8 to retain appeal, is we've largely stalled out on a half-century-old keypress-and-mousemove ux plateau. If it used some other "similarly" old interface tech (front-panel bit switches, paper tape, terminals as forms), the appeal would seem less.
The appeals of pico-8 and lispm seem somewhat related. But for lispm's cutting-edge "luxury car" power-user-ness. Perhaps the -8'ness constraint, and resulting bounded goals, is what makes doing the stack tractable (witness smalltalk but-do-you-have-a-library-for-X struggles)? But they've also struggled with adoption, which the Scratch-like lower-barriers-from-lower-ceiling might help with?
The smalltalk folks, with a (also keyboard-mouse) vision of full-stack, but with high-ceiling kid appeal, have struggled with both. And, maybe, XR might offer windows where society's UX and approach to software is more malleable.
So what are the implications for designing a powerful full-stack system that attracts a broad user base? To take advantage of some possible "XR is now gelling - as with phones, we're about to do a giant societal software rewrite - the course of future societal computer-and-software UX is briefly malleable"? Ideally one that instead of mac/lispm tractability-through-singular-hardware, has complexity-handling-power sufficient to blend Z80-to-insaneXR hardware-software diversity into something accessibly/appealingly/cozy tractable?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7893008