[HN Gopher] Playbit - playing around with computers should be fun
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       Playbit - playing around with computers should be fun
        
       Author : ChrisArchitect
       Score  : 53 points
       Date   : 2021-02-01 15:52 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (playb.it)
 (TXT) w3m dump (playb.it)
        
       | ianbicking wrote:
       | It's fairly abstract, but I like it as described. Specifically:
       | 
       | 1. As proposed it's working mostly at the OS level. That means it
       | should largely work with all the languages and tools people are
       | already used to. Lots of concepts like this expect everything to
       | be recreated from scratch.
       | 
       | 2. It doesn't fall into the devops approach of formally
       | specifying a container and then building it. That makes sense in
       | prod environments, but here it looks like you are encouraged to
       | just do what you want to do and the system can track the results.
       | 
       | 3. I guess file I/O is an okay abstraction? The example of
       | writing to /people/robin/inbox makes me expect that it will be
       | easy to add new filesystems (since a generalized messaging
       | systems seems like overreach), so I imagine creating interesting
       | little components exposed to the filesystem. That's friendlier
       | than APIs. Also filesystems enforce a regular metadata system
       | (paths) and encourage read/write APIs, both of which are great
       | features for exploration.
       | 
       | I don't really get the DOM references. Trees are a pain in the
       | ass. I prefer thinking of file paths as somewhat opaque strings
       | instead of hierarchy.
       | 
       | Using namespacing for anything useful is also questionable to me,
       | because it's so hard to know where the namespace is defined,
       | where it is consumed, how you might override that, and what
       | overriding a namespace actually means - if it means changing code
       | then changing a namespace reference changes the referencing
       | namespace, and it all starts exploding.
       | 
       | The really interesting question here is how REAL I/O works. Like,
       | how do these sandboxes talk to the world? A sandbox on its own is
       | kind of boring. How does it talk to a real screen, a real mouse,
       | to the network, to a browser, to a database? And can we make
       | these things easier and more playful? Glitch.com is cool, but if
       | you want to use any of these more persistent or external services
       | it still feels like becoming a sysadmin.
        
         | ianbicking wrote:
         | Here's a video just posted:
         | https://twitter.com/playbit_/status/1356338766999244801
         | 
         | I guess the DOM reference is the idea that there's a concrete
         | server-hosted tree-based data structure, and it also has cross-
         | image synchronization. Kind of CouchDB-like? I still hate trees
         | but I like that both structured persistence and collaboration
         | are part of the concept.
        
       | loa_in_ wrote:
       | I'm going to try implementing this
        
       | nynx wrote:
       | More, please.
        
       | zachrip wrote:
       | If you want more buy-in/understanding I think you need to provide
       | a small tech demo. The words written sound cool, but they're just
       | words at the moment (and vague at that).
       | 
       | Edit: this is written @playbit op, but I'm not sure op of this
       | post is the same person
        
       | tectonic wrote:
       | This sounds fascinating and fun.
        
       | whywhywhywhy wrote:
       | Love everything written here, but honestly you need at least a
       | video showing something... anything... or all you have here is an
       | idea.
       | 
       | I remember getting excited when Rasmus announced kod and nothing
       | came of that so I wont get my hopes up this time until there is
       | something beyond a few paragraphs.
        
         | loa_in_ wrote:
         | An idea that already showed up in _the_ community capable of
         | making it a reality. There's enough talented people here that
         | will be interested in doing this that it will happen sooner
         | than later
        
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       (page generated 2021-02-01 23:02 UTC)