Hello World Post
This is a new blog on a new (to me) platform, Bear. My main blog, at least for now, is Pylimitics.net. It's a WordPress site, and while I appreciate the ubiquity and reliability of WordPress, I don't like using it. The site editing system uses something they call "blocks," which I find much too complicated for the simple things I want to do.
I'm drawn to simple things, whether technical or not. I use computers a lot, of course, and there's very little simple about them. But even with fantastically complex digital systems, there is a spectrum of simplicity of use. One example is my go-to digital writing environment. It's a plain-text editor that I coded myself. It doesn't even understand markdown syntax, although I'm thinking about maybe adding that. When you launch it, it creates a document with a default name in a default directory, and automatically inserts the date on the first line. After that, I'm on my own, and while I find it an excellent writing tool, it is not at all a formatting tool. It's about the closest I can get to a typewriter, without the complications I don't like about typewriters. The noise, the inky ribbons, the sheets of paper to be stockpiled before use and then stored somewhere after. Also the physical heft of the things; far less convenient to tote around than a modern laptop.
I do a fair amount of computer programming too, and I gravitate toward a particular flavor of simplicity there, too. I prefer just using a text editor to write the code, then do any interactive stuff (y'know, like finding out if my code actually works) in a terminal window. I know, I know, an IDE provides lots of handy services you can look at them as easier and simpler. But there's simplicity and then there's simplicity.
The simplicity I like best is simplicity of tools. I'm not sure this equates to fewer abstraction layers, but it might. I am pretty sure the simplicity of overarching systems has something to do with my preferences too. Typewriters themselves are much simpler than digital computers. But then there's the system they exist in: the paper, the ink, the weight, the noise, the complication of editing and revision.
Another area is writing instruments like pens, markers, pencils, and the like. One way to look at these is that fountain pens are simpler than ball-point pens. I think I could probably construct a fountain pen that would work (probably badly). I could even make my own ink. But constructing a ball-point pen needs complex tools, and then there's the ink, which is a much thicker consistency, and seems like it would be much more difficult to concoct. Looking at things that way, even I would think I should prefer fountain pens. But I don't. Because using them is less simple. And while lots of folks report that the sensory experience of writing with a fountain pen is superior, I've never found it to be. I like pencils pretty well, except the sharpening part. You have to have a sharpener, and pencil sharpeners make a mess. So for me, a ballpoint pen or even a marker is what I like best.
This is all completely inconsistent, and leads me to wonder what this "simplicity" I like to talk about even is. The short answer is I don't know. Simplicity is not so simple.