Life is Tetris @tetrislife@qoto.org

@shapr it may be that capnproto qualifies?

@dckc @royaards how do we know it is not a joke? I understand "robots'd be expensive, so humans" but still.

@lxo I think such care seems to have great advantages down the road. e.g. Emacs packages simply have no equivalent.

@lxo it is a healthy success rate for a volunteer-driven movement!

But Sather et al never fitted into the big picture. And there were a multitude of them in free s/w, mimicing the scratch-an-itch nature of OSS. All that volunteer energy organized towards, say, GNUstep or Haiku might have made a difference; they could have written GNUstep(-only) apps in Sather/SmartEiffel/GNU Smalltalk. This not happening is what I was terming hubris, a lack of the care that made big parts of GNU work.

@lxo To explain my Sather-bashing bent of mind, I would rank project ideas by need in the GNU era and see if the needy ones got worked on.

A C compiler, libc, either Hurd or Linux, desktop environments, code forges. I think the first 2 worked out well (for society, but also for corporates). Maybe it should have been HaikuOS for the 3rd (better suited to society)! GNUstep was the right way for the 4th, since Apple didn't (couldn't) trip up libobjc. I guess it was a problem of plenty on the 5th.

@lxo oh, GNU and 0G are definitely not hubris! It is disheartening to hear websites have already started going away. BTW, #DeltaChat and #MonoclesChat have a leg up at this with in-chat #WebXDC apps.

@lxo mobile software is hostile to user moddability, and its hardware follows laptops in locking down the bootloader except tighter. Alternatives have no chance, unfortunately, even more so now that many websites refuse to remain websites on a mobile browser and push the app instead.

Neither GNU nor 0G can be expected to surmount these. Thankful even if just websites remain, with open laptops to access them on.

@lxo it was more about Sather, less about GNU, an example I wanted to call hubris-driven social initiative (no real need out there). I think the sort of social change that has democratic impediments probably is hubris rather than an actual alternative.

I agree GNU wasn't hubris-driven, and also that it succeeded. I never understood why people expected it to solve later challenges too! At best, GNU could have explicitly supported others tackling those challenges, like the #4opens criteria.

@lxo a long-winded way of suggesting that constructive initiatives should start at where people were before destructive initiatives took hold. GNU seems to have done exactly that in the Lisp Machine times. What else has done that since?

@lxo quite right.

But, I do question if atleast some initiatives aren't just hubris without understanding what people want (my pet peeve is me-too projects - GNU Sather?). Sure, there are many initiatives with ulterior motives, like proprietary software, and highlighting their inadvisable aspects is welcome. But implementations supporting the alternative always miss the train. Contrast that to the endurance of something like Emacs, which wasn't me-too material once it got ported to Unices.

@hamishcampbell @strypey delta chat seems to do exactly this, FWIW

@icedquinn I had to search, are you talking about slow productivity?

@vnikolov @octade you don't need a one-time exam for software authors, when you can have an exam for every software release: its even called "testing"! Of course, that means there has to be a spec; that is best written by the client side.