Ask HN: What are some works of outsider programming?

2 pointsby newswasboring5 anni fa1 comments

I recently saw the Jarvis Cocker documentary "Journey to the Outside". Its all about outside artist architecture, and its amazing. I would define outsider art as something which does intentionally not try to follow the conventional practices of the art form. Incidentally following them is unavoidable as some of these principals are just what makes the most sense in art forms. Like for works of Henry Darger he still incidentally follows a lot of rules of composition, but its clear its not intentional.

I was wondering if there are such examples of feats of programming. There is obviously TempleOS, which is even mentioned in the wikipedia page of outsider artists.

1 comments

forbes5 anni fa

I once briefly worked on a commercial system where the UI looked like it had been designed with a shotgun.

Dozens of UI elements. Nothing on the screen aligned. Nothing was in a logical place. Related items were not grouped together. Buttons had labels like 'Button1', 'Button1_'. The tab-order was completely random, so you had to use a mouse exclusively. It was a horror show.

The code underneath was just as crazy. The system was used day-to-day by several people who just understood its quirks. I made the fix I needed to make and got the hell out of there.