Speaking of language, sometimes I remember how incredibly weird it is that a software feature designed to help you achieve something is canonically called a "wizard".
Oh I need help configuring this, lemme light the beacon and call for the aid of Digital Gandalf
Now thinking about creating a movement to promote "hobbit software". Pretty chill, keeps to itself, tends to its databases, hangs out with other hobbit software at the pub, broadly unbothered by the scheming of the wizards and the orcs, oblivious to the rise and fall of software empires around them.
Oh, the Electron empire is going to war with the Reacts? Sounds ghastly, sorry to hear that. Me and the lads are off to the pub to run some cronjobs, wanna come along?
To follow the metaphor @danderson, we'd need the equivalent of the Rangers of the North, who actively patrolled the boundaries of the Shire and protected its inhabitants from ever needing to know anything about the world outside.
And those Rangers would need to be incorruptible, and the institution survive indefinitely with the same selfless, guardian-of-peace mission. All this despite getting mostly suspicion and ignorance of their role, from the Shire inhabitants.
Sounds like an unachievable fantasy to me.
@RL_Dane
there's also the suckless project. My understanding is that their philosophy is quite similar to the hobbit software idea of @danderson (though I must say, I like hobbit software more than suckless).
They have a page that lists software outside of their project that follows a similar philosophy, so basically a categorized list of hobbit software:
(of course zathura is in it)
I do like suckless. I use dmenu a decent bit, and I love nsxiv, which isn't actually a suckless.org project, but tries to be suckless in utility.
Also, I consider the #OpenBSD project to be similar in goal.
@oblomov @RL_Dane @danderson My impression of suckless software is that it optimizes for lines of code at the cost of complexity, in particular modifying software by applying patches shifts the complexity of making sure all the features interact well onto the users.
Also +1 for zathura, that's a great piece of software
Yeah, not all of their software is useful for everyone. I used st (with patches) for a little while. I do use dmenu the most out of their tools. I have used Surf a decent bit, as it's very memory-conservative for a modern browser, but I had some issues with the clipboard functionality.
Never tried dwm, though. I'm too hooked on the i3wm/sway tabbed windows, and can't go back to *just* tiling.
That's the classic Unix command line you are describing. Who needs SQL when you have tab separated value files and:
grep foo bar.tsv | cut -f 2,3,5 | sort | head
@hugo @danderson wrong duplication is way easier to fix than wrong abstraction.
We don't need to knead bread dough either; it still tastes like bread.
At the end of the book is The Scouring of the Shire, where the Shire is taken over and it's inhabitants enslaved, only to be saved be the 4 returning Hobbits.
At the end of the day the Electron React war will leave no place untainted!
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