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Now lie in it: an uxntal retrospective

. Autumn is just around the corner, and when the leaves begin to fall, it will have been four years since the early sketches of a personal computing system which became Uxn.

As a target, it shines most brightly in helping me to reduce the cost of iterating during software development itself, say we compare the minuscule drain of assembling a rom in comparison to rebuilding a native graphical application or reloading a webapp. The esoteric crowd looking at the Uxn specifications are rapid to point at various alternatives for which very little software exists, and the practical ones, at the limitations and ways in which it is deficient, "the memory is too small," "the opcodes too few," "stack machines are too slow", and so on. For others, who see their ideals and tools diverge, it might be encouraging to see prior explorations in that space; to those, I can only say that it is very unlikely that you will see building an environment that respects your values and idiosyncrasies as a waste of time, it might even bring you closer to others sharing in your struggles and who might become your friends.

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