Submitter pkkm dropped a comment in the "underrated tech" Ask HN a couple hours ago, talking about Arcan & linked a couple posts including this one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38499490

The whole series was fun! I favorites the post which I pretty rarely do. This post in particular stood out strongly to me! Neat combo of dynamic user programming & workspace! Expresses a nice malleable systems view of the world.

I have followed arcan and @letoram/@crazyloglad/... for many many years. It's perpetually one or two approachable explanations away from 'holy shit' this has been in plain sight for how long?!. The character behind is unfortunately a recluse. Jon Postel levels of recluse.

I am not convinced by pipeworld, an interesting tech demo to be sure, But I am not sure if it is any better, however I do find arcan very compelling, much more so than wayland, I think it is because waylands story is "how to build a fast local compositor" and arcan is more "how do we get all our displays to work together"

This is the reason why I keep coming to HN. I have been playing around in my head how the desktop could be redesigned to boost knowledge worker productivity and had not come across Arcan. Plenty to read now and so far not a single mention of LLMs which is refreshing.

I do love anything that makes it easier to wire things together. Pipes are great for non-graphical stuff, but we don't really have a good option for GUIs in the open source unix world (I think MacOS is winning here today with AppleScript in some ways).

each row is a pipe, each cell is being fed with the data from the cell before and the processed result sent to the cell after. As they reference, there is a full Ph.D thesis on the idea in the shape of 'userland' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gla830WPBVU - that describes it better but pipeworld shows how that is not just a PoC but a complete 'full desktop thing' thanks to being built on arcan.

Spreadsheet cells make everything better.

It literally lets non-programmers teach themselves to code, almost nothing else has accomplished that goal anywhere near as effectively.

But then the progress just stopped. Excel and Google sheets are great, but that's nowhere near the full extent of stuff that could have =expressions.

We haven't fully explored the other data types we could represent, non-2D layouts more suited for mobile reflow, network programming, etc.

We also have just barely started trying out giving end users SQL, which is completely simple enough for normal people until you get to the level where you need joins.

All I can see in the videos is typing one liners into small text boxes. I don't see any pipes and I don't understand how things fit together, how data is passed or what the overall structure is.

Those text boxes act like spreadsheet cells - which means you can reference them and use their data in other boxes.

I rmb someone posted a VSCode plugin where you can achieve similar mode, have multiple windows arranged inside like playing the cards in Solitaire.

I’m so glad this got posted. It’s very cool. Going to dedicate a weekend to tinkering with the desktop.

I like that it feels very much like pipelines which I write for my day job but combines tiling and it looks very fast.

I did go down a bit of a rabbit hole on the whole of the Arcan side of things. How have I not heard about this before? Very very cool stuff.

I made something with a similar inspiration recently: https://mwenge.github.io/blog/io10.html The idea is that you create data pipelines and operate on each step in the language of your choice.