Aesthetic Computing

Consider “ascetic computing”:

Here’s what “ascetic computing” means to me:

Doing without things that compromise my personal standards or morals.

Learning to live Fearlessly in the face of Missing Out.

Resisting the Endless Pursuit of Shiny Things. … The goal is to live a (computing) life of principle, purpose, and focus. … Nothing I do on computers is masochistic self-denial or performative mortification to impress anyone. Quite the opposite! I find my habits pleasurable and satisfying.

Yes, and: (1) many people’s aesthetic is ascetic computing, (2) for me, hey, man, I just don’t want to use vi.

I throw around the word “aesthetic” a lot. What I mean by that is that people’s selection of any given technology, and even their evaluation of it is driven by how it feels or looks. This is something like preference, but it’s also driven by their gut reaction regardless of function.

For example, every few years I check in on the Windows UI. It just looks weird. Or last time I saw Android, that just looked weird. Functionally, they’re all the same. TypeScript vs. Java, those versus Python. As is evident by numerous applications over the years, you can achieve the same ends with any of them. But, people have aesthetic reactions to them, and select which to use according to their perception of beauty or ugliness.

Nerd of course don’t use the word beauty. They say things like “this code is elegant.” The opposite is usually something like “this code is so wordy and bulky” (they usually mean Java).

I am no job scheduler expect, but it feels like a good example is from vs launchd vs some GUI with drop-downs that lets you select when a job runs with a UI similar to creating a reoccurring meeting.

cron is ascetic, like Mondrian, but if it was only one square. Launchd is probably something like “mass-market consumer,” like a picture of a cup of coffee you’d see in the eating room of a Marriott Courtyard. The GUI is decadent, something like Jeff Koons.

But, whichever you choose, the job runs.