requiem 🏴‍☠️
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There shouldn’t be any shame in writing small software. Everything doesn’t have to “scale”.

If you build something cool it’s valid and good if it makes you or just a few people happy.

This doesn’t make you a bad programmer.

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requiem 🏴‍☠️

Y’all encouraged me to explore this topic a bit more:

jasongullickson.com/human-scal

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DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab

@requiem software that solves one problem for one person once is successful. any use that software sees beyond that first use is gravy; it did its job. and if someone writes a lot of software that in the end did its job they are a pretty damn good programmer, I reckon.

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ｖｅｎｋｏ

@requiem
Software would be better if less of it was intended to scale imo

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Charles Stanhope

@requiem I think maybe we need to pursue new definitions of "scale" or find a new attribute to aspire to. Maybe "spread" or "inspire". "Yes, but can it spread?" 😆

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💀

@cstanhope @requiem If you can display it to another sentience in some form it can spread. Basically, everything can spread as long as you don't hide it

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Votton
@requiem Should never be the case to be shamed for and writing this small software is a good learning curve to learn new technologies in the first place to write websites in new frameworks for example or even in new languages. Same with programs generally it's beneficial.
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Vertigo #$FF

@requiem That's one reason why I enjoyed Project Oberon so much. Although it's still not refined enough for day to day operation, it's really close. And although it's not super-hyper-optimized like Linux is (or can be, at least), it's plenty fast enough for personal use.

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Kazriko
@vertigo @requiem If I were going to start enhancing an old OS and adding drivers and such to it, I might actually go with Oberon. I just think that being an OS not written in C, C++, or Assembly, that it would be much more fun to play around with the inner workings. CollapseOS with its Forth-based system is the next one I'd look at. Oberon is a better programming language than forth though, IMO, for all but the very lowest end systems.
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Vertigo #$FF

@kazriko @requiem Especially in conjunction with the environment, I agree. I love Forth for its simplicity, but it is not an appropriate notation for all tasks. That said, I do feel that Forth gets short-shrifted too much.

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Kazriko
@vertigo @requiem Forth is a pretty interesting language. It's just a bit on par with ASM in terms of cognitive load to develop for. But it's very light weight and cross architecture, so it's fairly versatile and useful in some spaces. The GA144 chip is an interesting example of what you can do with its light weight design.
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Vertigo #$FF

@kazriko @requiem I'm currently building a 9P client in the machine language of my Forth processor instruction set, which is fairly close to conventional Forth.

Once upon a time, I used Forth to drive my personal blog. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that Forth was wholesale unsuitable for the task. I took it as a challenge, and named the blog engine Unsuitable as a result. It happily ran my site for about three years, as I recall. ;)

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Kazriko
@vertigo @requiem Yeah, certainly can be done. You can do pretty much anything with Forth given the will, and I've seen some quite impressive stuff done with it. I just mean that I personally would prefer Oberon for systems with at least 1mb of ram. :)
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Vertigo #$FF

@kazriko @requiem
Not gonna lie; when it comes time to port my 9P server-side code to run on the Z80 processor of my RC2014, I've been considering Pascal or a home-grown subset of it if I cannot find a compatible cross-compiler.

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requiem 🏴‍☠️

@vertigo @kazriko I am mesmerized by the self-contained nature of project Oberon software (down to describing the processor itself!). I’ve considered building some systems based on it, but it’s a lot to do alone and hard to stay motivated without an audience.

I would love to participate with others on applying that system though, so it’s encouraging to meet people who also get it.

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Kazriko
@requiem @vertigo I'm mostly interested in its self-hosting nature on low end hardware, the ability to develop on a 25mhz 1mb system for itself is something you can't really do with the Arduino toolkits, Rust, GCC, etc. Even Micropython, though you can develop code for it without a separate system, can't compile micropython itself self-hosted. Forth's the same way though.
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Kazriko
@requiem @vertigo I like that he made his own processor, and it makes a very good reference implementation, but I want to get back to playing with it on other available hardware. (Teensy 4.x, ESP32, Risc-V, and maybe using Gameduino Dazzler for graphics.) Lots of stuff to learn about the systems and compilers first though.
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requiem 🏴‍☠️

@kazriko @vertigo this self-hosted thing, I 100% agree!

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just an actual husbear
@requiem True, but... And it's not the programmer's fault, but it's hard, maybe impossible, to stop people from trying to take any piece of software and attempt to make it scale way beyond the intended scope. No matter how much you try to emphasise in the documentation it was only ever meant for you and a couple of friends, you'll eventually hear about a small island nation or african country that's attempting to implement it for their entire population.
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