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Comment by PH01 | Hacker News Reader

If you read the comments in this thread it's clear that there are readers who haven't understood from the submission title or from the landing page what thi.ng is. When I read the word 'computational design' I don't immediately think of 'parametric design', 'algorithmic design', 'generative design'. Instead, I have to use google and read around. The landing page itself describes thi.ng as 'a truly manifold long-term project devoted to Computational Design'; again I'm a bit stumped, what does the author mean by manifold in this context? Go to the github page and the title reads 'Polyglot computational design tools', are we calling ourselves Polyglots now? Seriously?

That's usually about as far as I get before I conclude that I don't care enough. To my mind those are all flags which indicate that it's probably not something I want to engage with.

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That one is interesting indeed. I'm a bit curious about you taking issues with "manifold" and "polyglot" here:

- manifold - something taking many forms - polyglot - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglot_(computing)

I'm pretty sensitive to marketing BS/buzzwords myself, but unlike the usual "blazing fast" and similar hypephrases, the above two words actually are 100% correct use of the terms (IMHO)

See my other reply above re:scope and projects written in: TypeScript, Clojure/script, C, OpenCL, GLSL, VEX, Java, Forth - if this is not polyglot, then what is?

Correct doesn't mean it's obvious to the average person, especially with uncommon words. I for one don't ever use manifold as an adjective. In fact, I only use it as part of technobabble nonsense to cheekily remind my mathematician friend that he's free to think that the topics he works on are trivial, but that the rest of the world won't agree with him.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifold

Happy to entertain equally succinct counter proposals :)

To be frank, I take issue with manifold and polyglot because both come across as unnecessarily pretentious use of english. The secondary problem is that I looked in two places to find 'what' the project is. Instead of finding information I found adjectives which can convey an intention to impress, this can easily give a negative first impression.

With no context the sentence 'truly manifold long-term project devoted to ...' is meaningless to me, because I don't know if we share common definitions of four highly subjective terms: 'truly', 'manifold', 'long-term' and 'project'. On first impression this does not come across as a singular 'project' in the way I would define one. Consequently, as a first time reader a get confused.

In contrast to the site, your description in this thread 'thi.ng is definitely not a framework - it is a collection of ...' makes immediate sense. Here you expressed the essential information in a 20 word sentence. On the site the same thing is expressed in a meandering 40 word sentence.

Exactly, it seems like the intended audience is "people who are already familiar with it", but then it's unclear what use it is to them.

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