I share @oeyoews concerns about the high investment on a pretty niche language when you learn all the bells and whistles of the TW operator/filter language, with low support on your dev environment or even inside TW. For example, in other environments, once you have extended the core language, let’s say, creating a function or a method, you get type completion, tooltip suggestions, keyboard shortcuts and so on. When you create a macro or procedure on TW you don’t get any of this, and I find myself editing my macro tiddlers just to see the source code and remember the parameters of my own defined macros.
I did a more elaborated response on Operators/filters knowledge seems too specific and difficult to recontextualize elsewhere and I even proposed there an imaginary Lua DSL embedded in TW to address the composition of functions, that would work like operators/filters, but it would apply more general programming principles, while still it would keep a compact syntax (of course, with the advantage of moving in the imagination and without dealing with the reality of its implementation).
I use and enjoy TiddlyWiki daily and find it pretty inspiring, even within its constrains and limitations (which are inspiring also). But when I think how to bridge the gap between programmers and non programmers in TW, my mind tends to go into more abstract/architectural concerns to deal with the problems stated above:
Could we enable extension languages beyond JS for TW?
If yes, how this would change functionality in TW, offering still a gentile learning path between content and functionality creators in the wiki, which is one of the big advantages of TW, but with more general concepts that can be used outside TW and with improved tool support that is usual there?
My path to explore such questions is more related with some alternative explorations, that I hope can come back in some way to TW.
I am one of the British (few?) who delighted in their childhood in dangling their feet in the River Soar and paddling the Grand Union Canal—that swarms with Tiddlers. Most folk are not so lucky to have ducks, water and Tiddlers as their greatest friends.
FYI, a mature Stickleback is much bigger than a Tiddler. A Tiddler is any very small fish that (a) lives in a swarm [aka a “volatile shoal” in fish-ese]; (b) is not afraid of a human; (c) will happily nibble your feet.
Right. It all happened 10 years after I needed it.
Back in the day I was fighting for (as an anthropologist with massive descriptive data) text-basesnot data-bases.
It all came out okay.
But I’m still a bit non-plussed whether, now, “wiki” means anything other than “web-page”? Well, WikiPedia, I guess, since it is a system. But most other “wikis” … ??
My question is … is TW really …
A -- A Cunningham Wiki
… or …
B -- A Ruston Module
It seems to me that JR has outdone Cunningham by eating the internet into one pod.
is a variant we should collectively (or @jeremyruston as inventor) should claim, copyright, and allow as acceptable shorthand if possible. It seems to be available as a domain name, if .com or .org were added.
It’s clearly not appropriate to allow any other solution to claim or copyright that string, or to claim such a website. And it takes zero learning curve to connect with TiddlyWiki (TWiki might have been similar, but has been claimed.)
TidWiki doesn’t sound silly or hard to get one’s mouth around, and it gets us the tiddler connection with no fuss…
hmmm, TidWiki and Tiddler will be as hard to explain as TiddlyWiki and Tiddler. So for me there is no difference other than causing a lot of work and problems.
Sure, the explanations for newbies are needed. I’m not sure there’s any metaphor (short of “card” for old fogeys who remember HyperCard) that would bypass the need for explaining the atomic units of TiddlyWiki…
Whatever the metaphor (atom, bit, card, record, tiddler, facet, gene, node, cell… ), the power of these units in TiddlyWiki — and how their transclusions create a kaleidoscope of options — will always need to be modeled and witnessed to be appreciated.
My thought is just that transitioning to a shorter name — as in from “Federal Express” to FedEx — is as seamless as a nickname gaining popularity, doesn’t even ever have to be official to be useful.
It’s the one place where it seems to me that it couldn’t be a mistake to plant a flag …
I have seen this naming debate occur many times over the years, my personal conclusion is;
TiddlyWiki is a unique name that has a substantial history, lots of search juice and whist abstract (very importiant) also makes people ask what it is.
It is trivial to rebrand your wiki to any name you want, the underlying platform is of course tiddlywiki.
The potentialy trivial sounding name is quickly eliminated if you refer to “The TiddlyWiki Platfom” and implies the multitude of functions, features and posibilities.
The “TiddlyWiki Platform”
In some ways none of have the right to name tiddlywiki something else and continue to be refering to the original tiddlywiki, any alternate name comes loaded with the different perspectives of those creating the name.
Thus using a second word to qualify what it is, does not compromise it’s originality but allows you to change the emphasis.
Call it “TiddlyWiki Obsidian” or “TiddlyWiki Amethyst” if you want to and can avoid litigation.
TiddlyWiki Platform - volcanic rock
Or use an alternate catch Phrase (subtitle) to that on tiddlywiki.com “TiddlyWiki a non-linear personal web notebook” eg; “TiddlyWiki a personal database app/website”
Right. This, socio-linguistically, is true. I’d say “Fedex” knowing it is “Federal Express”—as many (most) would.
Note, however, an international English using a pre-exisiting vocabulary where “Fed”, “The Feds”, “The FBI” etc. were known and used and know their referant is “Federal”.
“FedEx” is deep in that cultural usage context.
Several of us oldboys/girlspeople have been round the swings and roundabouts of “The Name” a bunch (a lot) of times already.
In the past I was more “change it”. As years go by far less so.
History, rightly, creates healthy inertia.
@pmario I feel makes the simplest vital question, being (my interpretation) …
Given the context now. Years after invention. WHY attempt change a name that would, likely, very likely, be difficult, work intensive and create legacy issues, to acheive?
I think there’s obviously a pretty big circle of overlapping use cases for Obsidian and TiddlyWiki, but they are considerably different, I think even more different than Google Maps to OpenStreetMap. They’re not even the same kind of thing, they can just be used for some of the same kinds of purposes.
I guess that Obsidian became popular quickly for similar reasons to those explaining why Python became popular across disciplines – because people who are code literate but not super technical liked it. (Then because Python became popular among slightly technical academic users etc., it became increasingly used by actual developers for more lower level purposes.)
It’s fun and easy for someone who likes to write in plain text in text editors to keep notes in markdown – a more-or-less common sense and universal standard for slightly computer savvy people who dislike GUIs. TiddlyWiki is not only more technically complicated to use at a fairly deep level, but it’s also less text native. The typical use of TiddlyWiki is to click things in its browser GUI, even though the wikitext aspect is WYSIWYM (to use the terminology in //Grok TiddlyWiki//). To use TiddlyWiki in a more text-native and filestystem-native workflow requires also using NodeJS, which requires more technical expertise and effort to set up. So if you’re not a programmer but you like working in plain text and feeling superior to people who take notes in Microsoft Office software, Obsidian is more gratifying.
But TiddlyWiki is a fully featured and fundamentally unified hypertext system, encapsulating the design structures informing browsers and the web and a deeper level of implementation. So TiddlyWiki is way better at designing systems for cross-referencing content.
