Pseudominimalism

   Pseudominimalism is the kind of technology design which aims to appear
   [1]minimalist on the outside while being [2]bloated on the inside. Rather
   than trying to achieve a [3]truly good, minimalist design from the ground
   up, with all its advantages, pseudominimalism merely attempts to hide the
   ugliness of its internals and appeal purely by the looks. A typical
   example might be a website that has a minimalist look -- a blank
   background with sans-serif [4]font text and a few nice looking vector
   shapes -- which in the background sneakily uses dozens of [5]JavaScript
   frameworks and libraries and requires a high end [6]CPU in order to even
   appear responsive. Essentially all [7]modern "retro" video [8]games are
   pseudominimalist in design, they use pixelated graphics but are created in
   enormous frameworks such as [9]Unity or [10]Godot; even projects calling
   themselves "minimalist", such as many [11]fantasy consoles, are in truth
   only pseudominimalist, written in extremely high level languages such as
   [12]JavaScript. [13]Apple is heavily practicing pseudominimalism.

   While true minimalists do appreciate minimalist look as well,
   pseudominimalists are obsessed with visuals, the casing, the shell and
   that is their true goal to which they sacrifice the internal beauty, so
   after a while you learn to spot pseudominimalist just by their attempts at
   what they call a "clean design" or "user experience" -- a true minimalist
   uses minimalism so that bullshit doesn't stands in his way, a
   pseudominimalist is just a snob using visuals to pretend he's an
   intellectual or, as he loves to say, an "artist". You will see the sweat
   that went into font choice, spacing of paragraphs with this tryharding
   leaking even to language in which he tries to use minimum of words which
   just makes it hard to understand what he wants to say. A typical example
   is the [14]shitty 100r wiki.

   Another example is presented by many "[15]modern" [16]CLI programs which
   [17]code monkeys use to impress their [18]YouTube viewers or to feel like
   matrix haxors. Some people believe that anything running in the command
   line has to be minimalist by some kind of law of nature -- this is less
   and less true as we progress into the [19]future. A lot of [20]capitalist
   software add a CLI interface ex post on top of an already bloated program
   (they even invented a term for this: "[21]headless"), often by simply
   disabling [22]GUI (but leaving all its [23]dependencies in). An example
   may be the [24]gomux chat client.

   Another form of pseudominimalism is making a minimalist tool for something
   that in itself is a non-minimalist [25]bullshit -- for example minimalist
   frontend for Facebook, minimalist Steam client, minimalist password
   manager, minimalist minimalist [26]Bitcoin wallet etc.

   And that's not all -- another kind of pseudominimalism appearing among the
   new generation of crippled pseudoprogrammers is all about writing very few
   [27]lines of code in some incredibly bloated language and calling that
   "minimalism". Something like a Minecraft clone in 100 LOC of Python using
   only Python standard library, the catch of course being that [28]Python
   itself is hugely bloated and its standard library is enormous, therefore
   they just hide all the complexity out of view. Effort like that is indeed
   completely useless and only serves for flexing in front of beginners who
   can't spot the obvious trick. Even if obvious, it has to be noted that
   minimalist software cannot be written in a bloated language.

Links:
1. minimalism.md
2. bloat.md
3. lrs.md
4. font.md
5. js.md
6. cpu.md
7. modern.md
8. game.md
9. unity.md
10. godot.md
11. fantasy_console.md
12. javascript.md
13. apple.md
14. xxiivv.md
15. modern.md
16. cli.md
17. coder.md
18. youtube.md
19. future.md
20. capitalist_software.md
21. headless.md
22. gui.md
23. dependency.md
24. gomux.md
25. bullshit.md
26. bitcoin.md
27. loc.md
28. python.md