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A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

trevoragilbert.com

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Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#61

Post by ToucanLoucan »

skydhash wrote: post #57
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree and disagree. In the realm specifically of computers, I think kiddos today who do have the inclination to tinker in the ways we remember fondly doing so are going to have a lot harder time of it. I personally have spent time around Zoomers who were raised on iPads, and they love and are interested in learning more about technology, but at the same time are coming at it with what I perceive at least to be a far…

While I think your point is valid, IMO, entering in tech is so much easier. There's much more information available and you can tinker with hardware much more easier due to low prices. But it's very much easier to watch Youtube and play games on a playstation, so they do that.

I can't speak for everyone but I can tell you what my ice-breaking moment was that got me into software: I was playing the original Driver game for PC, and via reading on Gamespot forums, learned you could give yourself god-mode + access to any map if you went into the files and edited the map configuration, which was stored as plain text and easily editable. I never completed more than like... 3 missions of that game back then, I was just too dumb, but I was smart enough to edit a text file and it was the first time I altered software without using an interface or settings menu.

Of course being a dumb kid I assumed all software was like this and broke many files and executables opening them in Notepad and changing random characters, but nevertheless I credit this with starting me down the path of being a software developer. I don't think most people get into this stuff because it's easy or hard, we get into it because we want the computer to do something that it isn't currently doing, and we look for a way to make it do that. And of course there are still innumerable ways to go about it now, but they are paradoxically more complicated (not able to be performed in something like notepad, usually) and also less complicated (installing mods via Nexus, for example, is not technically challenging: the software does the vast majority of the work for you).

Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#62

Post by Smaug123 »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #52
bpye wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really appreciate how easy Nix makes this. It’s relatively straightforward to overlay a package in your configuration to add a patch - meaning I get to apply my own patches and also get updates from upstream - at least until my patch doesn’t apply cleanly.

That sounds interesting, do you have an example somewhere? I hadn't really considered this nix specific - does it make it easier than git normally allows (by keeping your patch in a branch?)

If you keep a patch in a branch, then you have to keep merging the upstream and your commit hashes become different from what everyone else sees, for example.

Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#63

Post by fsflover »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #55
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…

Agree and disagree. In the realm specifically of computers, I think kiddos today who do have the inclination to tinker in the ways we remember fondly doing so are going to have a lot harder time of it. I personally have spent time around Zoomers who were raised on iPads, and they love and are interested in learning more about technology, but at the same time are coming at it with what I perceive at least to be a far…

> if you do want your kid to go into software, if it isn't already obvious to you, take away their stupid phone and give them a proper computer

Or, better, give them two in one, i.e., a GNU/Linux phone.

Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#64

Post by ElevenLathe »

whartung wrote: post #43
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.

The Pharo hackers write Pharo to enable them to make Pharo better. They are a shining manifestation of eating their own dog food. Outcomes of this effort are powerful version control and package management. I don’t know, but it seems quite clear to me that Pharo folks start with base images, load their package dependencies on top of it, then hack away on their own code. Inevitably they create a new package with a lis…

Yeah, I'm somewhat of a Pharo hacker and the workflow is pretty similar to any other software: Start with a base image, create a package, add code to the package, use git (via Iceberg) to save diffs for a particular package off for distribution. It's analogous to hacking on an operating system image in a container: keep your code and the system separate (via the "packages" abstraction in a Pharo image, or via the filesystem in an OCI container image) and you will be fine. The "Baseline" concept is a bit opaque (and weirdly named IMO, but a lot of the Pharo community is European, and especially French, so presumably it makes more sense in that context) but is a form of dependency management that works OK, though it would be nice to have a more Linux-distro type experience for installing packages.

Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#65

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

trevyn wrote: post #39
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just dense. I use a handful of macros to abstract out repetitive patterns (EACH is a for-loop that iterates over all the elements of a lil list/dict), very short names for the most frequently-used utility functions (lin: lil-is-number? lil: lil-is-list? lmn: lil-make-number, lml: lil-make-list, etc), and typically aim for one idea/process per line, rather than one statement. I find most C code dreadfully verbose…

I’m curious: How many spaces is the tab size in your editor?

Usually two.

Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#66

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

mapreduce wrote: post #49
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #5

As a young child with only the scarcest grasp of programming, I spent endless hours using ResEdit to crack open and customize every application on my mac. Every game and utility was filled with its own surprises; graphics I could edit, tables of strings to pore over, dialogs to rearrange, menus to customize, and so much more. I never had a manual, but everything was so straightforward and clear I learned everything I…

Decker looks lovely. Can you speak more about how you create the wonderful HyperCard theme? Did you create your own graphical toolkit to match the Hypercard theme and draw everything yourself with that toolkit? And is this available as a desktop too? or is it web only?

Everything in web-decker is drawn to a canvas using a custom software-rendered imgui-style UI toolkit. I considered this approach essential for maintaining fidelity across platforms and implementations, but it does come with notable accessibility and performance tradeoffs.

There is a native version of Decker implemented in C using SDL2. It's fairly easy to build from source for Linux[0], and I offer periodic Windows and MacOS builds on itch.io[1].

[0] https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Decker#building

[1] https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker

Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#67

Post by eimrine »

koonsolo wrote: post #47
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…

If you look at the state of drones an robotics right now, the 90's were nowhere near that. So to any kid that is interested in technical things, there are currently 0 things holding you back: You all of the worlds information at your fingertips, can order any electronics part for cheap, can build cool things with tiny computers.

Drones has no more relation to software then an M16A4 to the metal crafting.

Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#68

Post by eimrine »

maxbond wrote: post #16
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…

Could you give an example of a different avenue we could pursue? Your thesis seems plausible to me but I don't understand what we would do differently in light of it.

> Could you give an example of a different avenue we could pursue?

FOSS.

Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#69

Post by bitwize »

I'm fond of software I like to call "pervasively programmable", Emacs and the various Smalltalk environments being ur-examples. Every bit of them can be examined, inspected at run time, and changed in the running system as you work. It's the next step beyond open source. (If you compiled Emacs yourself, Emacs will remember where its C source lives and will happily bring that up if you M-. on one of its C primitives.) And I think we should celebrate and encourage software like that.

Re: A Love Letter to Tinkerable Software

#70

Post by bitwize »

trilinearnz wrote: post #2

Agree with this. For me, being able to tweak Quake (when it came out) was massive. You could poke around in QuakeC, make a funny model / map etc. The fact that customisability extended to it's two sequels was even better. To a lesser extent, even being able to modify pretty much any game mechanic via the pull-down Console was amazing too. A great entryway to programming for the young enthusiast! Always was a wonderfu…

Game modding is going to go away almost entirely soon. The vanguard here is Capcom. They have gotten a bit uncomfortable with modders who do things like put Chun Li and Cammy in bikinis, not to mention the possibility for cheat mods. Accordingly, they now consider modding to be the equivalent of piracy and have implemented mod-preventing DRM in their back catalog of PC games.

Other companies will soon follow. There's too much risk to a company's bottom line and reputation to allow or encourage modding. Mods compete with official DLC packs, and if someone streams with, say, a mod that puts a swastika on the main character or something, that harms the publisher's reputation.

I would say hang on to your old copies of Doom and Quake... but Doom and Quake are Microsoft products now, and Microsoft doubtless has ways to make the asset packs unavailable except to official ports which require a Microsoft account to play.

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