Simpatico: audience

2023 jbr

Audience

Experienced programmers and cs folk curious about new ideas in the field

Simpatico is ultimately a collection ideas, experiments, in the foundations of programming. It expresses ideas large and small about data-modeling, application design, usability, and performance in both prose and code.

End users

These devices we program are very cool gadgets Simpatico should make building cool gadgets fun and easy. The gadgets themselves must be simple to use and at least interesting, if not actually useful. A walkie talkie, a compass, a GPS, a chat room, a database, a word processor - the browser can do all that with very little code!

Artificial Intelligence

Training a coding assistant on the code base. They are more dangerous and powerful than ever, and fewer people seem interested, of learning how they work. This should give us all concern, especially as the machines offer a viable way to program themselves. But one killer application is programmer productivity. I'd like to see how well it does with a relatively novel setup.

Philosophers

Particularly fans of E.O. Wilson's "Consilience". There is something universal about the these data-structures, and it feels good to be able to express it. The notion of divergence and convergence, of the "tree of life", is a good metaphor for the stree. There is something really striking about the data-structure, and the way it makes you consider causality. In a sense it's the low-entropy version of Braid or the other time-travel games that were popular a few years ago.

My Heroes

Perhaps my favorite audience to contemplate - the people who have inspired me, and who I hope to inspire. Tim Berners-Lee. Bret Victor. Rich Hickey. Doug Crockford. Roy Fielding (from my alma mater, and the OAC - go Anteaters!) Marc Andresseen, Brandon Eich, and Mozilla for the web in general and JavaScript in particular. The spark was struck with Logo on the Apple IIe - Seymour Papert and Steve Wozniak. And of course Alan Kay and the rest of the gang at Xerox PARC for getting the ball rolling. Also a big fan of real-world relational databases, like Postgres and MySQL. And very small programs that do lots of things, like redbean.

My kids

You two are the light of my life, and make everything I do worthwhile. Maybe one day you'll get a chance to use Simpatico, that would be amazing!

The Dispossessed

I've tried to make this software as accessible as possible, which means very small, and very fast. I've also tried to make it as hard to abuse as possible, minimizing the threat it presents to the users. I've put my own money into a foundation to keep the service running for no less than 10 years. This was only possible because of careful, frugal system design.

Myself

How much value can I create for $5/mo? I'm not sure, but I'm going to find out.

Examples

Airfoil Beautifully done interactive online essay.