We are constantly reading of stories with one main theme where people turn to seemingly “simple” systems in order to manage complexity; except that these systems manage to produce complex problems, without having to acquire historical cruft, or suffering from any of the usual issues that produce non-essential complexity. There is a trend in programming language design, and a particular language that we will focus on, that are both seemingly gaining popularity today, for their minimalism and supposed simplicity. However, neither is awfully simple in practise; it appears there are good reasons why, and we will give some reasons at the end of this article.

  • brombek
    3·
    2 years ago

    I think the inspiration behind uxn is game “Another World” which was made very portable as it is actually implemented as a VM: https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons/

    The idea is that if your work is implemented on a VM that is very easy to implement. Then you can port all your programs to past and future computer systems by just implementing that VM on the computer you have at hand. This is the “permacomputing” part of uxn and has nothing to do with reliability or performance (although Another World was quite impressive as for Amiga 500).

    Another thing is that uxn was designed with games, arts and music in mind and not with replacing life critical systems with.