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. -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. 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.
