[mike_hearn]

Well it's for the same reason that Twitter is popular: intentional limitations that cut everyone down to the same height make something approachable and feel friendly. Nobody can excel on the Picotron, so it's inviting to try because you won't be comparing your work to someone else who did something so much more impressive. Likewise in classical Twitter nobody could write a truly great tweet due to the character length limits, and that set the tone and encouraged everyone to get involved. Compare with blogging on something like Substack where people who might otherwise publish something end up comparing themselves to Scott Alexander or Matt Taibbi and concluding they can't compete.

I think in computing there's the other issue that modern programming has a big focus on safety and security which was absent in the 8-bit era. If you sit down to make a Mac app you're not only going to compare your work to Apple's own, but you're also going to be constantly distracted by things that aren't "fun" like slow compilers, type systems, notarization and code signing etc. These are all important for people who use computers as end users but if you just want to hack about and make something they suck away the energy.

[mncharity]

> intentional limitations that cut everyone down to the same height make something approachable and feel friendly

I wonder if generative ai might someday have a similar effect? Imagine a "make me a game" tool, with LLM-like "Fortnight, in space, with cute animals, and classical music". Ok... "the default music sync with action is fine, but as health declines, make the tone darker. And give my dog an oboe theme." Removing design-space cliffs, scattering defaults and highways, adding exoskeletons, as alternatives to shortened horizons. Kids today finger paint with pigments that would be the envy of painters past who ground their own - "use only charcoal" still has a role, but... there's also neon pens with sparkles for diaries, stamps in kid paint programs, and ... . Imagine a future coloring book, with speech to text to outline image, collaborative coloring, and "ok, now make that a 3D rigged avatar, skinned in the style of an oil painting". Making it easier to fly around the space, rather than lowering the ceiling.

[bitwize]

> Nobody can excel on the Picotron,

Uhhh... have you seen Pico-8 development. People can excel on that thing. The limitations make the achievements even more remarkable. If you want to see the excellence in coding, combine the two and check out the people who wrote BBC BASIC raytracers in a tweet. If anything, we're in a glut of shitty code today partly because our comparatively powerful machines, combined with a race to the bottom in terms of churning product out quickly, make writing and shipping something extremely unoptimized far, far easier than taking time to polish the end product.

I think you're onto something, in that the Pico-8 and Picotron are going for the "vibe" of retro home computer/console programming but are not capturing the true essence of it. With 8-bit home computers, you started off in BASIC and could build simple games and stuff -- but if you wanted to write anything performant then you had to drop down to assembly and there was a significant difficulty spike there. So even back then we were dealing with "unfun" stuff. (In general, the enjoyment you got out of such work was proportional to the effort you put in.)

[mike_hearn]

Yeah, I know. I had an early Acorn machine as a kid and couldn't figure out how my favourite games were made. I was aware they weren't using BASIC, but how they really did it was a mystery. And 3D graphics like Elite left me foxed. I tried to do my own but had never heard of trigonometry so that didn't go far :)

Even so, the span in which you can excel is far more limited. Nothing stops you making 8-bit graphics today (see Notch) but people and especially kids will compare what they can do to, say, Call of Duty and lose interest when they realize how far away they are. Micro games at least tended to be made by one person, so it was theoretically possible to get that level of skill yourself.