[meta] What other software can elicit the same reaction as TiddlyWiki?

[Jeremy Ruston]

I was struck by how these rather nicely expressed words might equally apply to the experience of using TiddlyWiki. It’s actually somebody talking about a specialised programming language for "live coding” musical performances:

> Tidal is an invitation, a map with many areas marked "here be dragons..." It's
> a master carpenter's tool kit, but, also a heap of unorganized Legos. Tidal is
> a playground where both discovery and questions arise simultaneously. It's an
> intriguing, frustrating mute, a sly cipher, a breathing mandala, a dose of
> friendly venom. It's a supreme blank slate, a piece of graph paper with a Z
> axis. A series of amusements and also wretched dead-ends. Tidal is 101
> unexpectedly popping balloons, a lucid dream. It is a bicycle that once you
> learn to ride it, reveals that it can FLY.
>
> Tidal is the thing I think about almost more often than anything else. It is
> impressive enough to sufficiently motivate an old man who yells at clouds to
> learn completely new things (writing code) and learn more about things ignored
> thus far (music fundamentals).
>
> Tidal is amazing: I don't know what it is.

Source: http://lurk.org/groups/tidal/messages/post/54YnfgMDakbh7KgPG05Vc2

I like the idea that TiddlyWiki is part of a tradition of tools that have the quality of being “generative”: they are meta-tools let you build other, specialised tools for the task at hand. Other examples would be Microsoft Access and Apple’s Hypercard.

I think it’s that quality that gives rise to the hall-of-mirrors sensation of dizzying possibility that has become familiar as people talk about their experience of using TiddlyWiki.

What do you think? Does TiddlyWiki feel like that to you? Are there other tools you’ve used that have the same quality? Are there situations where “here be dragons” might scare people off?

Best wishes

Jeremy.

[Alex Hough]

Hi Jeremy,

The post chimes with me, replace tidal with TiddlyWiki to gain a fair impression of my position. (It is a glorious text isn't it?)

I also like the idea of  TW being in a tradition of generative tools, there is an opening for a generative hypertext tool. Plugins like Tobia's random tiddler and make tiddler point towards a future where TW could be obviously a generative hypertext tool.

My personal favourite exponent of generative systems is Brian Eno. I sense that generative systems "had their time" and can appear deeply uncool, like progressive rock and trippy fractals. But I also sense that they are coming back.

Flow

Yesterday on the radio [1] someone was talking about video games, technology and "flow" [2], for me TW delivers a learning curve which delivers a flow state for many people. You can start of my drawing a picture and making an interactive story (like my 6 year old) and you could end up trying to understand what a quine and reading about the philosophy of the quine.

I like to see TW in the tradition of Leheman's zetlekasten  [4] and of Ashby's card index. Interlinked notes become part of the system one uses for thinking. 

The name Osmosoft pretty much hit the nail on the head for me. It alludes to biological computing, a strand of computing history with which Ashby (I psychologist by training) was closely associated.

 

TW is a tool and a meta tool for itself and for thinking in general.

Lambda

In Manchester there is an event called Lambda lounge: i went a few times. It's interrupting to note that Tidal is "is embedded in the Haskell language". After the event, I spoke to a chap working for the BBC in the computing division (we have them up in Manchester now)

 Does TW follow a similar programming paradigm? If so it may attract attention from the lambda people. It seems to me this is a good direction for computing to move in. And of course, that is purely a hunch: I am not a specialist and have a dangerous little knowledge about the subject which opens up the possibilities for creating useful and not so useful errors in logic.

Téléologie et fonctions biologiques

I wish I could understand Albero's stuff here : http://tesis.tiddlyspot.com/

Meta hangout?

Lets have a meta hangout!

Alex

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06zqn0v

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Van_Orman_Quine

[4] http://takingnotenow.blogspot.co.uk/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkasten.html

[5] http://takingnotenow.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/w-ross-ashbys-journals-and-index-cards.html

[6] http://www.lambdalounge.org.uk/

[7] http://tidal.lurk.org/

Jeremy.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tiddlywiki+...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to tiddl...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/1EC121B7-AF39-44C4-BD9B-874DBB5E6586%40gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Alex Hough]

PS

I posted somewhere on the group a link to this :https://github.com/Tonejs/Tone.js

If there was an integration, TW could have a musical aspect. A "patch" could be generated from TW data, change count, number of tiddlers, number of tags ... etc etc

Anyway-- it would be generative and show TW's capacity as a generative tool

Alex

[Irene Knapp]

Yes, personally, I definitely got that feeling the first time I saw TiddlyWiki. For what it's worth, I remember HyperCard, and I think TW appeals to a similar sort of user even though the things it builds are different.

TW has a really nice on-ramp because it has a few simple and obvious use-cases, such as note-taking and journalling. I guess those were also example uses of HyperCard, but not trivial to set up, and not what most stacks I remember were about. The consistent volume of feature requests on these mailing lists over the past years is a testament that TW tempts people to imagine uses.

Irene

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/CALc1hYez8B9saD4fPqfWKZR-%2BhHu%2B7NruvOgpENzqZu4SCkxiQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Alex Hough]

Dear All,

Could we schedule this topic to be on the next hangout?

Alex

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/CAHmBUs9Xh_p8a%2BgdbpU0%2Bbjg%3D07OUZ1VsTJymdsH%3Dq0SaCEK%3DQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Alex

On 11 Feb 2016, at 10:39, Alex Hough <r.a....@gmail.com> wrote:

Could we schedule this topic to be on the next hangout?

I’ve updated the agenda on http://hangout-98.tiddlyspot.com/

Many thanks,

Jeremy.

[Smandoli]

TW represents what computers should always have been doing -- fulfilling the 1945 Memex proposal, and lifting our thinking off of an accountant's balance sheet and onto a surf board (and then putting us back on the balance sheet if appropriate).  The hyperlink and the mouse should have taken us quite directly to personal information management.  Instead we got the Internet and carpal tunnel syndrome.  Somehow we ended up with "typewriter plus" and "accounting ledger plus", when what we needed was "thinking plus".  TW sets this right.  The slow adoption, both of the application itself and its functionality (which by now should have inspired many new enterprises), is disheartening,  But TW's continued development is gives hope.

[Alex Hough]

Wonderful words Smandoli

Alex

On 13 February 2016 at 02:53, Smandoli <themant...@gmail.com> wrote:

TW represents what computers should always have been doing -- fulfilling the 1945 Memex proposal, and lifting our thinking off of an accountant's balance sheet and onto a surf board (and then putting us back on the balance sheet if appropriate).  The hyperlink and the mouse should have taken us quite directly to personal information management.  Instead we got the Internet and carpal tunnel syndrome.  Somehow we ended up with "typewriter plus" and "accounting ledger plus", when what we needed was "thinking plus".  TW sets this right.  The slow adoption, both of the application itself and its functionality (which by now should have inspired many new enterprises), must mean  frightening things for humans.  The continued development of TW is one of the more hopeful things I know of.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tiddlywiki+...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to tiddl...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/e8b604c1-b25e-41a2-804a-85453c958217%40googlegroups.com.

[Tobias Beer]

Hi Smandoli,

Now that is some thoughtful prose.  :-)

I very much agree that TiddlyWiki enables the "prose end" of software,

that it's more about narratives than it ever was about plain figures,

while it can handle both the abstract and the concrete with ease.

It's a tool to explore the world, and a world to explore in its own right,

and then again a place for you to explore yourself in

and discover as well as invent your own thought-processes,

rather than one to help make thinking ever more water-and-fail-proof or standards-compliant

...form an end user perspective as well as that of a developer.

Best wishes,

Tobias 

[Matabele]

Hi

I had a similar reaction the first time I played around with a spreadsheet many years ago (Lotus 123.) Of course, spreadsheets are now old hat, but I know someone who still does everything in spreadsheets (letters, tenders, bom's, certificates, quotes, accounts, wages, notes etc.)

I always wished that any code fragment (in any language) could be placed into a cell though :-)

regards

[Smandoli]

Matabele, I think you mean Lotus 123 was exciting to discover, gave you a feeling of power?  My moment of discovering that kind of glory was Electric Pencil, which my Dad let me play with on his computer in 1981.  I wrote two poems that I still think about.   Four years later I found this kind of rush again, using a mouse for the first time and fill in pixels with MacPaint.  I think it would be a lot of fun to gather people's "computer epiphanies", mind-blowing first encounters.  TW wasn't the first Big Bang software experience for me, but it's the one that has been the most significant since the 1980's and it's the one that still delivers hits of adrenal joy. 

On Monday, February 15, 2016 at 9:44:05 AM UTC-6, Matabele wrote:

Hi

I had a similar reaction the first time I played around with a spreadsheet many years ago (Lotus 123.) Of course, spreadsheets are now old hat, ...

[Eric Shulman]

On Monday, February 15, 2016 at 8:30:21 AM UTC-8, Smandoli wrote:

Matabele, I think you mean Lotus 123 was exciting to discover, gave you a feeling of power?  My moment of discovering that kind of glory was Electric Pencil, which my Dad let me play with on his computer in 1981.  I wrote two poems that I still think about.   Four years later I found this kind of rush again, using a mouse for the first time and fill in pixels with MacPaint.

I think it would be a lot of fun to gather people's "computer epiphanies", mind-blowing first encounters.  TW wasn't the first Big Bang software experience for me, but it's the one that has been the most significant since the 1980's and it's the one that still delivers hits of adrenal joy.  

 

I've been very fortunate to have actually experienced some of the major computing "breakthroughs" of the past 35+ years... here's some of my personal computer milestones:

* used ElectricPencil in 1979 on a TRS-80 (model 1, level II)

  = word processing

* used Xerox PARC Altos in 1981 (at Carnegie-Mellon)

  = mouse, windows, networking, multi-user

* accounts at both CMU and MIT via ArpaNet 1981

  = pre-internet!

* bought a Mac 128K in June 1984 (6 months after the Mac was first shipped)...

  = personal gui machine

* worked *at* Lotus as a developer on 1-2-3 (for Windows and OS/2) from 1988-1993

  = spreadsheets

* created my first website in 1993 (worldline.com - a stock analysis/report service)

  = websites

.. and, of course, for the past 10+ years... TiddlyWiki.

-e

[Smandoli]

Eric .... Wow!

[Alex Hough]

Eric,

You might have written it before, but could you give us some insight into why TiddlyWiki has captured your imagination? You obviously understand programming very deeply, is TW different than other programs? Is it the same as others?

I'd also like to ask the same of other technically minded and competent readers of this message. 

best wishes

Alex

On 15 February 2016 at 21:34, Smandoli <themant...@gmail.com> wrote:

Eric .... Wow!

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tiddlywiki+...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to tiddl...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/f9fa8028-3723-4308-b629-1f9a35c1ec09%40googlegroups.com.

[newbie]

Hi Jeremy,

after TiddlyWiki appeared the first time on my screen, it took about two hours until I realized what had happened:

it was like the first time I had Visicalc on my 40x24 Apple ][  screen, this strange impression

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Visicalc.png 

Don't get me wrong: I mean the power of your concept is similar to Dan Bricklin's.

Regards,

newbie

[Peter Miller]

I remember HyperCard with some affection and nostalgia but these days the only generative software I use of similar ilk is OpenSimulator. As of today's viewer update I can display (and potentially edit) TiddlyWiki 5 inworld. This is going to be very useful for documenting builds (that's 17th century Liverpool being mapped out in the background, tiddlywiki.com and tiddlymap.org on a "prim" in the foreground). Sometimes it's great when worlds "collide"!

Best wishes

Peter

[Peter Miller]

For hackability the entity-component model of Mozilla's http://aframe.io/ also shows promise in the same 3D context.