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by nrjames
2022 days ago
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I've used Processing extensively, including toxilibs, and follow the creative coding community relatively closely. When I look at projects like openFrameworks or libcinder or Processing/p5.js, it's pretty clear to me both what those project are and how to get started with them. I've kept an eye on thi.ng for years. I like the visuals on the former and current homepage and it seems like something that I would like to understand better. However, exactly what thi.ng is or how I am supposed to use it -- that always remains ever so slightly out of reach to me. The messaging is so focused on cobbling micro-libraries together that it feels like it is left to the reader to understand the possibility space of what you can achieve by doing so. For me, at least, that introduces enough friction to trying the tools that I feel tired and move on to something else. If you can, I'd consider creating a few very straightforward Shiffman-esque tutorials (a la Nature of Code or something) that drop the discussion of why things are structured how they are and focus instead on helping the reader create something. I feel like if you help draw the line between the capabilities of the libraries and using them in production that the entire project will be more accessible. |
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There're ~100 examples for thi.ng/umbrella alone, all commented, all linked from the readme's of each package used. Additionally, I've spent a lot of time this year adding more readmes, docstrings (again with examples), create diagrams etc. I completely get your comments/position, but I'm also really wondering if any of this work is just wasted effort if no one actually reads/looks at that stuff... and that then makes it even harder for me to prioritize.
FWIW I will also start streaming again in December, focusing on smaller projects/examples than previously. Maybe that format will work better for newcomers.
Obviously, there's no desire from my end to be overly cryptic about what you can do with these projects, but whereas P5, OF etc at their core all have a fairly narrow scope (DSLs for OpenGL API and some data wrangling sugar) and only gain their incredible flexibility through various addons and sheer community size, thi.ng simply has no core and that is the hardest thing to "sell" to people, even though IMHO it's also one of it's most unique aspects...
thi.ng is an ecosystem (as others have put it), not following the standard main pillar/silo + plugin architectures...