We tried it once, but it didn’t grab my son’s interest at the outset. I’m going to have us try again as I’ve heard nothing but praise for it.

My son and I are like 95% done the end-game content in the Super Mario RPG remake, only Culex 3D remains! It’s been a total blast. My biggest struggle is finding more games like this.

We’ve loved all the Paper Mario games we’ve been able to play (original, Super, TYD, and Origami King…. unless I’m forgetting one), but trying out miscellaneous JRPGs hasn’t had any success with him yet. He’s too young for a lot of games, but seeing things from that pre-tween point of view I also feel like we all could do with more games that aren’t fueled by adolescent angst or grim brooding. Bright, fun adventure on a foundation of silliness paired with great music is such a good recipe.

I adore the Outer Wilds vibe, but had the same experience and it still doesn’t sit well with me! Years later and the game still comes to mind, but the periodic resets were so unpleasant for me that I didn’t see it all the way through. Maybe this will be the year….

Agree with many of the other comments here saying that they’d be very wary of such a project based on what these choices say about the project’s maintainers. Something else is that while I have real affection for email and particularly IRC based on past experience, I don’t think these two are without problems. Email is so asynchronous that many folks feel obligated to treat writing messages to a list more formally. This is not totally misguided since everyone subscribed gets this message delivered to them. IRC, on the other hand, is so synchronous that you should reasonably worry if anyone will be there to talk with, and about whether or not there are searchable archives.

Something (like GitHub) that can be quick but is also perfectly serviceable for asynchronous communication really does have advantages, imho.

I went with ggplot2 some time ago, despite not using or knowing R at all. What pushed me in that direction was that I was using other plotting libraries (I don’t recall which at the time), and there was some aspect of spacing between elements or some such that was making a particular plot look ever so slightly ugly in my eyes… and I couldn’t fix it!

In my frustration, I consciously decided to set aside my version of your “reasonably designed” requirement (I find R consistently frustrating in this regard, though I know some people do all their programming in it and I salute them). I gave ggplot2 a try with a cargo culting approach: search for how to make the kind of plot you want to make, and just tweak that template. I was blown away. I could find recipes for everything I wanted to do, the results were instantly more attractive than what I had before, and I could tweak everything.

matplotlib is absolutely a reasonable option, but even years later I still have R environments attached to most projects specifically for data visualization, and still produce plots that are delightfully aesthetic. So here’s one voice to say that ggplot2 has real merit, especially if your aim is specifically to produce visualizations rather than explore a programming ecosystem.

Emacs with lsp-mode is my preferred environment for Rust development!