TL;DR: You may be right about LISP issues, but my intent was show how IO and social factors seem key to platform success

I'll skip discussing Python for the moment because I think there are a lot of things wrong with it. If I try, we'll be here forever, but they mostly come down to not enough consistency and it being pointless to discuss for reasons which will become clear below.

Whatever the nature of the cause/effect of the LISP ecosystem, I see Octo's issues as similar in result:

1. There is no way to load and persist useful data in any popular CHIP-8 variant

2. Once people get a taste, the lack of IO means they do one of two things:

* leave

* become emulator or assembly developers

3. They few who stay in Octo or CHIP-8 are interested in writing their own tools, libraries, and ISA variants

Keep in mind, I still see this as success. This is based on my understanding of the Octo author's post saying farewell to running OctoJams[1] and my time as a participant. It got me interested in assembly and has helped many other people learn and begin to use low-level tools.

Compare this to Uxn:

* Although flawed, it has useful IO capabilities

* People have built applications which they use to perform real work every day

* An already-familiar ecosystem of tools exists to cater to the interests of similarly-minded people

> 40 years ago lisp was vastly more capable than the alternatives, along many axes. smalltalk was an exception, but smalltalk wasn't really available to most people. both as a programming language and as a development environment, lisp was like technology from the future, but you could use it in 01984.

Yes, I think that's getting at what I mean. One of the motivating factors for 100r was that Xcode is bad fit for people who live on a boat with solar-powered computers. So are Visual Studio or PyCharm.

Although the Uxn ecoysystem is far from optimal, it's still better than those heavy IDEs. Better yet, it was already mostly here a few years ago. Even to this day, it feels like it's from some point(s) in a better timeline where the world wasn't full of leftpad/polyfill/AI or whatever the next ridiculous crisis will be.

In other words, Uxn is a pidgin[2] of ideas "solarpunk" or even just small, understandable computer types like. At the same time, it does this without too much purism holding it back:

* Simple enough and familiar enough mish-mash of forth and low-color, plane-based display

* Low enough power that its cheaper than Xcode to run without more effort

* Enough IO capabilities to get things done

Since it already had all of this as of a few years ago, it's had time for social effects to take off. For example, you can share a picture, a music track, or text
made using Uxn-based software. Those files will still work even if the Uxn spec evolves in backward-incompatible ways again. Its design choices are also inherently good for (or limited to) producing art aligned with the aesthetics of the creators. That seems to be part of a self-reinforcing popularity loop at this point.

Although it's theoretically possible to make similar things using CHIP-8 based tools, nobody bothers. Even if you record the output of music sequencers which have been written for it, you can't really save your work or load in data from elsewhere. In theory, there's the 16 bytes of the persistent state registers in XO-CHIP which could be repurposed from a calculator-like thing into IO, but the fact I'm mentioning it should underline the main issue in that community: purity concerns. Those limit it more than having "real" 16 buttons do. Yes, you could do some interesting multiplexing or even just bit-shift every other button press to make a pretend terminal-like keyboard, but the purity focus inadvertently kills interest more than silly function pointer syntax.

Decker is the complete opposite of Octo in this. It also goes even farther than Uxn in giving up purity concerns. Sure, it's complicated and inefficient, but it is inherently built around sharing widgets with others in a mishmash of HyperCard and Web 1.0 revival spirit:

1. You can make gifs with it, and this is probably its most popular use in the form of Wigglypaint[3]

2. When asked "um, can I borrow source from it?", the answer is "Absolutely!"[4]

This is why as much as certain Python projects frustrate me, I'm not trying to fix their inherent Python-ness right now. I just accept they're what they are. As you pointed out, it's better than the alternatives in many cases. Before you ask, I won't go as far as calling JavaScript is good, but I'll admit it's shareable. :P

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin

[2]: https://beyondloom.com/blog/octojam.html

[3]: https://internet-janitor.itch.io/wigglypaint

[4]: https://itch.io/post/10183760