@toast @trickster@mastodon.technology @einziggurat Wow this is awesome thread! So we have several "variations" on The UNIX Philosophy here. (It's okay to reinvent the wheel because a wagon wheel is not a street bicycle wheel is not is not a racing bicycle wheel is not a car wheel is not an airplane wheel):

1. The Original UNIX Philosophy
2. Suckless
3. Small Technology
4. Trivial Technology
5. Techs Should Factor (my slogan)

I collected the "position statements" on a wiki [here](https://wiki.ircnow.org/index.php?n=Debate.UnixPhilosophy) that anyone can edit.

Anyway I love TT, obviously! I see EXTERNAL.md has a list of other projects. The ["DIY epi pencil"](https://fourthievesvinegar.org/) looks interesting. N.B. idk if it's legit! Not medical advice!

>10. Minimize the amount of "meta-work" required.

This is definitely good. However what "meta-work" is, is content dependent. E.g. "send me your public ssh key" is trivial for me to understand, but can take an hour of handholding to get to someone that has never heard of PuTTY before!

>no, that actually increases cognitive load, you're thinking of computational load; the two are often at odds
you can write TT in most languages

I suggest generalizing this **cognitive** vs **computational** distinction to dependency management as well:

>things the reader does not need to understand:
- internal implementation details of the deps
- the platform upon which things run (e.g how linux works internally, otherwise we have a recursion problem)

A project should of course try to minimize "**cognitive** dependencies", but when "**cognitive** dependencies" do exist it should list them as prerequisites: e.g. do you need to know what a Fourier Transform is to make use of this software or not.

Then of course at a meta level projects can be sorted by their **cognitive** dependences as well, and possibly even matched with educational modules "satisfying" said **cognitive** dependencies (althought the educational modules would of course themselves be dependent on additional **cognitive** dependencies...)

#YearOfDecentralization #YearOfTheFediverse !!

@toast @trickster@mastodon.technology @einziggurat @uniq @kingannoy @Antanicus @ignaloidas @sylveon