wordsandbuttons VS makepad

Meanwhile, all the pages on https://wordsandbuttons.online/ with all the animation and interactivity are still below 64 KB.

This one, for example, https://wordsandbuttons.online/trippy_polynomials_in_arctang... is 51 KB.

And the code is not at all economical. It's 80% copy-paste with little deviations. There is no attempt to save by being clever either, it's all just good old vanilla JS. And no zipping, no space reduction. The code is perfectly readable when opened with the "View page source" button.

The trick is - zero dependency policy. No third party, no internal. All the code you need, you get along with the HTML file. Paradoxically, in the long run, copy-paste is a bloat preventor, not a bloat cause.

I do all the https://wordsandbuttons.online/ by hand, and this is my top 10:

    2527 p

Cloning things makes maintenance harder linearly. Generalizing things makes maintenance harder exponentially. Counterintuitively, generalization only makes sense on small numbers or reiterations, not the vice-versa.

I started https://wordsandbuttons.online as an experiment in zero-dependencies architecture. No third-party, no self-reference. Every page is completely independent. I was told, that as it grew, it would inevitably become impossible to maintain.

Five years passed, including a two-year pause for writing a book. I did more than half a hundred interactive tutorials and quizzes, and continue to add them when I have time. The thing simply refuses to go "too complex to maintain". All the maintenance problems I ever faced with this design were handled within minutes. If there is too much typing, I write a Python script. If not, I do the change manually, replicate it in a few pages, and go on.

As a free bonus, since all my pages are essentially hand-written, no dependencies = no uncontrolled growth, they are all fewer than 64 KB each. Ultra-fast to load, and I never get a "Reddit effect" since even 1000 requests a second is only 64 MB of data. It's green then tea too. I usually have a few hundred thousand visitors a year, and they barely consume enough electricity to boil a kettle of water.

I think this rule of three, like many others is just an attempt to escape well-known complexity issues by putting them under a carpet of less known complexity issues. I'm very happy to have ignored it when considering design for my site.

Done! All the expandables have background colors now. https://github.com/akalenuk/wordsandbuttons/commit/22ef6295c... Thanks for the idea!

Very indirectly. My https://wordsandbuttons.online/ helped me cement a publishing deal with Manning, and the book I wrote for them (https://www.manning.com/books/geometry-for-programmers) works as a hourly rate magnifier in contract work negotiations.

I do https://wordsandbuttons.online/ as a personal-ish website. I don't append my face to every page but a visitor is usually a few clicks away from my other works so the site is de-facto more or less personal.

First of all, it's a nice hobby. No bullshit programming, no frameworks, no dependencies, no annoying editors. I just write my code and text and enjoy doing so.

Second, it gives powerful motivation to study. I'm now writing a new page on rational interpolation and just yesterday I accidentally found a very simple way to avoid the Runge effect. I was just playing with interactives and it came out of the blue. There is no way I would have learned it otherwise.

Third, it helped me cement a publishing deal with Manning. They came to me and proposed to propose them a book on geometry. And so I did. The book is called Geometry for Programmers and it's coming this summer.

Fourth, I do public lectures (or at least I used to before the war), and the audience loves interactive illustrations. So I usually turn my site pages into presentation-like pages and do lectures with them.

So for me, having a website pays off in multiple ways.

It is what Makepad is working on in an interesting way using Wasm and Rust. They have created a Figma-like DSL and a good code separation with the logic behind it. You can edit UI's of in-production apps, and they are bundling an editor for that. Accessibility is an issue, and the project are looking to offer proper support there. In their video linked on the README they run the conference slides on Makepad with live apps embedded and running at 120 fps.

https://github.com/makepad/makepad

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36567681

> if anyone tells you they need to use WebAssembly to make the UI snappy I'd advise you interrogate that assertion thoroughly.

Get prepared to be blown away by Makepad [0]. I have no affiliation with them, but just watched their most recent conference presentation [1]. The slides were made with Makepad itself and included, embedded, a full-blown IDE, a synthesizer app, a Mandelbrod to zoom in endlessly, and more. All running at 120fps. The presentation is for the most part live-coding with this setup.

What they want to do is bring coders and designers closer together, and while some code is in Rust they developed a DSL for the GUI parts that is close to how Figma works. These GUI's can run anywhere.

And I couldn't help thinking "Why would people have complicated stacks to create Web 2.0 apps for the Google Web, when they have this?", in other words an opportunity to break out of the browser straitjacket.

[0] https://github.com/makepad/makepad

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC4FCS-oMpg

For those who haven’t seen it, Makepad is also an in-browser code editor with an open-source UI toolkit. Looks like this synth is one of the examples of the UI toolkit.

https://makepad.dev/

And I'm obsessed with what happens when you press Alt in their editor. I never knew I wanted this, but boy, do I want it.

I tried this, using https://makepad.dev our GPU accelerated UI and renderstack. And unfortunately it wasn't a great experience. Text popping forward for whatever reason is not really an improvement (i tried indent depth, syntax highlighting reasons, cursor behavior). Maybe 'veeeeery' subtly could do something, but otherwise you dont want it to break visual symmetry as we are used to

Wow, so they did: https://github.com/makepad/makepad/pull/142

It says on the front page Mac and Web only

https://github.com/makepad/makepad#prerequisites

(windows and linux are coming )

We can! It’s a lot of work because you don’t have the whole JS ecosystem to fall back on, but to some that’s a feature not a bug.

My favorite example of this is https://makepad.dev

And a feature highlight of Code Lens. The idea is borrowed from https://github.com/makepad/makepad

When it comes to compile times, the most optimized Rust codebase I know for optimized for this is makepad.dev [1].

It is compiling from scratch on mac m1 in around 7.5s [2] and that's +100k lines of Rust. However there is close to none dependencies, so this +100k is all there is to compile pretty much.

[1] https://makepad.dev/

[2] https://twitter.com/rikarends/status/1467529091284934666