Permacomputing
2024-11-30 -- 2025-01-30Permacomputing is both a concept and a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in computer and network technology inspired by permaculture. -- https://permacomputing.net/
This concept becomes extra impactful with the realisation that many of the computer skills we develop can easily be taken away from us. For example, your photoshop skills can easily be taken away from you if Adobe's licence server stops working or you loose internet. Or some support for a standard is dropped, like what happened with flash, where a large community of animators and game makers suddenly lost an important tool.
The regenerativity concept is about making your software resilient to a changing technological landscape. Building upon a big fancy language and related platform and ecosystem makes your software project susceptible to be lost should that language and/or ecosystem not be maintained anymore. Instead, building your software projects on a simple interface towards the underlying platform allows you to reimplement the platform to get your project back up. Example are NES games, that still work great today thanks to it not being a monumental task to create an NES emulator. In a similar manner, the small virtual machine (vm) uxn aims to be a small vm that is reasonable to implement wich you can target your programs against.