I’m of the mindset that a TiddlyWiki instance today is something that should still work just fine 10 years down the road.
I have two individuals who say, paraphrasing, that TiddlyWiki is the opposite of future proof, and I think they are out to lunch.
What would be an intelligent counter to they naysayers?
My post in a BASIC forum:
Just a thought for which I have to figure out the right wording and how to fit that in as one of the features/qualities/characteristics of BASIC Anywhere Machine.
Because it runs in a web browser and it is a fully self-contained single file (i.e. IDE, interpreter, programs, everything):
Your personal copy of BASIC Anywhere Machine and everything you put in it, it will probably all work fine as-is on any web browser in 10-20 years from now.
All of the BASIC programs are all there, in one file.
You don’t have to go find the install files like you would for a traditional BASIC implementation and hope that it installs and runs on the latest operating system.
So BASIC Anywhere Machine inherits this quality from TiddlyWiki: Future Proof.
A copy of BASIC Anywhere Machine has zero dependencies on anything other than a web browser. Forever. (Comparatively speaking? In practicality?)
Reply #1:
That sounds very nice, except browser engines are now enormously complex. They require powerful computers with modern operating systems to work at all. Already we’re down to only two of them, and it’s unlikely that another will come along at this point to revive the competition. It’s not 2004 anymore. So anything that depends on a web browser, like Twine (another child of TiddlyWiki that holds a big chunk of the world’s culture), could easily go the way of Flash. And accessibility is a serious issue.
BAM is cool, and can be very useful as a showcase of Basic, but it’s the very opposite of future-proof, unfortunately. And we don’t have good solutions.
Reply #2:
eh yes it is self-containd BUT require browser
would be nice to have mimimal browser with self-contained BAM
then that would be totally portable .
On windows there are few portable browsers ..but then that is not OS
agnostic…right ?
I’ll throw those in my slap-fight with these guys, but their arguments or so goofy that it is like talking past each other.
It’s kind of weird, because I’ve got some fans of BASIC who totally seem to get the value of BASIC hosted in TiddlyWiki, but then a whole bunch of folk who seem against it (in a “trying to undermine it” way) which seems kind of strange to me.
If they were bringing up concerns that I could address, or problems that I could fix, that would be great.
But to say that it, it being a TiddlyWiki instance, is the opposite of future proof throws me for a major loop.
One observation is that much of my work as a programmer in the 1980s is now preserved via the very active retro-computing emulation community. For example, here’s a game that I wrote in 1983 running in an emulator:
I think it’s reasonable to expect the same trend in the future, with people in 100 years happily running Chrome 234 in an emulator…
I have a version of Bob running in electron that is a completely self-contained version, so there is that.
Electron isn’t exactly a lightweight thing itself, but there are ways to keeping tiddlywiki going even if there is some browser apocolypse 2.0 that means we can’t run in a normal browser at all.
I’m thinking it would be cool if that emulator could exist in a TiddlyWiki instance, for use offline.
Unless I’m over-estimating the usefulness of TiddlyWiki for that kind of thing? Is there already something out there that allows that emulator to run on any device offline ?
Don’t mind me: that’s been a big thing at the forefront of my TiddlyWiki use case thinking lately, TiddlyWiki as a (sort of) virtual machine.
At best, that’s a loosely tethered set of negatives (some poorly articulated) that have nothing to do with TW or future-proof-ability. He’s trying to build toward a QED but since (s)he doesn’t have one, closes with an opinion about something entirely unrelated.
Charlie, move on. You can’t win against such poor, blinkered, uninformed opinion.
Reply #2? <crickets>
Aside: How old is TiddlyWikiClassic? 19? It’s certainly “not 2004 anymore” but TW was working in 2004…
My “flame baiting” and “trolling” radar aren’t all that great. (If that’s what is going on over there.)
Easy for me to get suckered-in when my pet project is getting critiqued on points that get me cognitively glitching because the points seem nonsensical to me. Paralysis by analysis over here, big time.
However, it does become less relevant. I imagine in a hundred years all programming will be done by computers, taking general instructions from humans and converting them into actions. Oh, and they probably won’t be called “computers” anymore. Just as there are people who still nap stone into knives, there will be some people who still do hand-programming. But it will be very niche. I would guess there will be more people in a hundred years that knit their own clothes than people who write their own code.
Basic is on the wane. Javascript, the basis of TiddlyWiki, is used in servers (node.js) and in web pages. It is used by Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Instagram, Yahoo, Khan Academy … and many, many more. Thinking a hundred years into the future is futile, but 20 years on JS will be still highly supported.
Keeping in mind that I look upon things with Windows 2-tier software development glasses …
What I’m thinking (i.e. virtual machine) is nothing revolutionary at all, but it gets my wheels spinning furiously and my geek mojo going. I might just be overly excited because of my glasses.
Kind of silly maybe, but it is nice to read a simple “absolutely” confirmation about this obvious (to the point of not worth mentioning?) characteristic of web browsers.
Show them classic.tiddlywiki.com and tell them that the software development started in 2004 and still works as intended. Users still use it. It’s the same author and TW5 is developed with the same philosophy in mind.
That was an enjoyable read. Thanks for taking the time !
The only thing I would say about BASIC, is that for whatever years I’ve got left in me, it is the way for me to add things to TiddlyWiki in a language I enjoy. I find the combo makes for very fun solution development.
Last 5 years trying, I cannot stand javascript at all. I appreciate the good stuff built, and am grateful that there are folk skilled in it. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to ever do anything with javascript other than very small things I need and can’t do otherwise.
And whatever I build in BASIC in TiddlyWiki, because it is being interpreted by javascript, will still work in 20 years because JS will be still highly supported. Which makes me happy. Whatever I do should last even beyond my lifetime.
The BASIC guys raining on my parade because they don’t like TiddlyWiki, and the TiddlyWiki guys raining on my parade because they don’t like BASIC, both are equally baffling to me. I do not get at all the need to poo-poo what I’m doing or poo-poo the value that I see in it and share for those interested.
Kind of like I have folk in two totally different camps have a need to dissuade my sharing. Feels weird. I would have thought that if one is not interested in what I’m doing, why not just ignore me?
I share this joy for the TiddlyWiki-BASIC combo in case there are any other oddballs like me who do find joy in it too.
