Four Years with Decker

Commenters focused on Decker as a curious, retro-flavored UI/engine: several applauded its uniqueness and nostalgic appeal, with nikitau likening it to alt-history projects like Arduboy and PICO-8 and asking whether its constraints are deliberate creativity. supermaurio2000 and others appreciated that a saved HTML file contains the whole engine with no external calls, while veqq shared an interview with the maker and ingenieros and others framed Decker as a spiritual successor to HyperCard, recommending the original as context. xyzzy_plugh and other technically minded commenters highlighted the codebase’s startling shape - a single, very dense source file - calling it one of the craziest codebases they know and linking to the raw source for inspection.

Opinion divides around legibility, maintainability, and whether the aesthetic constraints are a feature or liability. icen argued the dense file is actually readable with sensible names and formatting, while Insanity and others described it as nightmarish and raised maintenance concerns, suggesting LLMs or tests could aid refactoring; xyzzy_plugh even injected a subtle bug as a challenge. Some commenters celebrated the cozy, pre-web UX and creative limits, while others worried the single-file, mixed code-and-presentation approach makes long-term work brittle and inscrutable. Supermaurio2000’s offhand “who will port Decker to Decker?” captured the playful, cultish enthusiasm alongside practical skepticism.