blipmusic

Keep making TUIs. Keep making whatever you want. These "terminals weren't made for that" kind of comments are a bit tiresome. I can run TUIs on machines I only have ssh access to and they are often leaner than the corresponding GUI variant - though perhaps less so with today's fancier TUIs. 'top' has a TUI and isn't exactly new, some interactivity - yes, even in a terminal - can be nice.

I'm currently trying to create a GUI version (immediate mode library) of a CLI tool of mine and it's mostly a shit show and three times the work of a data-in-data-out CLI tool. Good learning experience, though. I should note that I don't care whether the GUI version has a "native feel" or not (if you have the time to do so, be my guest), only whether it's functional and reasonably fast, since otherwise that's even more work for an open-source tool. Though, when I undoubtedly make the more interactive TUI version later on (ratatui just seems too nice not to try! :-)) it will probably bring a similar complexity development wise.

Then again I'm not into agentic coding at all so maybe the joke's on me. On the other hand, at the moment I need to learn about the data I'm processing, the GUI library/framework I use, and being able to help the people I work with troubleshoot the equipment that collects said data. I'd miss out on most of that if I coded by prompt. Perhaps I'll try later, perhaps not.

Keep making TUIs, or GUIs for that matter.

My life does in fact have priorities above ”LLMs should work a bit better”.

His "argument" for strict typing on the Lex Fridman podcast was also that it's mostly if you have "hundreds or (of?) thousands of engineers collaborating", which "strictly" puts his opinion in the bin in my case. I have absolutely, positively become more productive as a single developer due to strict typing. Parsing various kinds of binary data was enough to convince me. A.k.a. each to their own. On the whole, Elixir and BEAM seem really cool though, and there's work being done on typing, as well as the new Gleam language.

Note: I've not yet done any serious web-development, mostly command line tools, which I realise is not DHH's main focus.

Most posts of this kind are completely void of thoughts on how society - including public institutions - require you have a smart phone nowadays.

I don't use my smart phone that much (probably more than I think, though). It's practical as a portable music/podcast player, a camera that's always with me etc. Occasionally I read a programming book, or blog post. I would love a good feature phone, with fantastic battery life.

But what I absolutely need a smart phone (and their secure enclaves) for are all the connected systems my country implements without hesitation: electronic authentication (most public services, such as healthcare, bank, taxes etc), public transport (they had seconds thoughts, though, and a plastic card is available). It's frankly dumb, and nonchalant to build societies like this. I can go into a train tunnel a lose coverage. Rural areas are not always covered, yet we (at least here) build systems depending on internet as if we all lived in the densest part of a large city.

That's primarily why I can't (currently) use a feature phone, not because I lack in self control.

Case in point if anyone wonders why Apple [seems to] refuse developing a more desktop-like OS. I guess the M4 iPad Pro got many of us dreaming. :)

To me, part of this is due to the app-centric nature of iPadOS, as opposed to the more file/data-centric nature of a conventional "desktop" OS.

You have it wrong. Apple doesn’t fundamentally believe in selling one device (do-it-all iPad Pro) as opposed to selling two (Mac + iPad). The segmentation is a business decision, nothing else.

Apple have multiple iPad lines and could easily limit a desktop class OS to the iPad Pro, a move I can almost guarantuee would alianate noone.

I don't mean to belittle your great achievement with license annoyances so forgive me if this sounds harsh, but I won't look twice at any software with an online requirement, if internet connectivity is not an integral part of the software itself. I do realise open source can be a dark, unthankful place that will not pay bills for most developers so this is not about the cost itself.

Unfortunately, pirates almost always have it easier than paying customers, since license checks will probably be removed. Though this is hearsay (anyone?), there was "legal piracy" (no, there's no such thing :P) in the license-via-printer-port-dongle-era, since the dongles sometimes failed at the worst of times (e.g. live recording at a studio). So some users/studios bought a license to be legally covered on paper, but used a pirated version.

I live in a "well-connected" country, but a traveling a few kilometers in the wrong direction leaves me in complete radio silence, and sometimes work (academia) has required me to stay at such places for a couple of days. Since you know Rust, I can (and have had the need to) add `--offline` when building, with required crates locally cached. I know many researchers with the need to bring high-tech equipment + software to remote locations for work over many weeks, sometimes months. The need to find a city just to do a software license check would be crazy.

Unfortunately, I also don't have a good solution, other than trying to trust your customers. An online check once, at install, I can possibly live with, even if I've had to do reinstalls from local files in the field as well...

> There are tons of types of “Pros”.

Regardless of our personal professional affinities the only reason iPadOS stays locked down is that it's simply more profitable to sell a customer two devices instead of just one. I would love to have an iPad Pro as my only home computer, but it's just not doable due to its OS limitations. The artistic angle is just Apple's way to make the platform believable.

Why would an artist care if I can also compile code on an iPad?

I can only assume that macOS must be offensive to some due to its "openness". The truth is that macOS allows me to be both an artist and a developer, and I don't have a single doubt that Apple could pull off an interface that allows a similar experience on iPadOS. It's just that doing so will lose them money.

That sounds reasonable. I'm writing a dumb, little journal/todo CLI tool for personal use ("meet with @farmer @Monday @13:30 regarding #carrots"), and the library I used for time has a duration for most things except month (i.e. you can't do 2024-03-20 + 1_MONTH), which makes sense.

Well, that’s not “the month” at all, though. At least not something I’d use outside of getting a rough idea for setting the next meeting, and absolutely wouldn’t use in code (but it’s probably fine for a todo - I’m complicating things, sorry ;-))

Edit: but perhaps that’s the custom used at many places and I’m just not aware.

Wouldn't a "month" risk being many days off the intended target date, since it's a non-fixed timespan? E.g. how many days is "1 month from today" (March 20)? You mention medicine, so I assume there's something obvious I'm missing (then again, perhaps the constantly shifting dates for health care appointments where I live say otherwise ;D).

What? No. I can run these on a server and get the same UI as locally, which is great. As with everything else sometimes TUIs make sense, sometimes not. There are a lot of crappy GUIs out there as well, which would have been better served as CLI tools (in my subjective opinion).

And what is "IS NOT meant for fancy user interfaces" supposed to mean? (and what about various constraints back in the day as the actual reason for a data in/data out-only interface as opposed to "intent"?) I could argue that tmux is "fancy", since it is a multi-panel workspace, mirroring GUI capabilities, but apparently that's Ok according to you. So your conclusion seems to be that TUIs are actually ok in general - you just don't like bad/over designed interfaces (subjective terms, of course), which is understandable. Sorry, but I don't get your point. Bad interfaces are everywhere.

(I kind of like fancy TUIs when they make sense, to be honest, so there's that)