The toplap wiki has some more history about the community too: https://toplap.org/wiki/HistoricalPerformances

Edit: oh right! Also the toplap documentary from 2005 has some actual video of early live coding performances from this community. https://archive.org/details/toplap-documentary

IIRC, that team are also (now) live-music-coding veterans, which in turn has informed how Strudel is built. It's not just a project that does stuff, it's a pretty well crafted instrument that is ideal for these performances.

As an engineer, I love letting the requirements shape the solution, but this is just on a whole other level.

Have you taken a look at how to install the Haskell variant? It's a full-on recipe, or a docker container. I'd take a desktop application over a website any day, but that was not on the menu. It was an SPA vs a devops exercise. Of course the SPA wins.

Yes. The web wins on deployment every time.

Steam wins for games imho.

Tidal Cycles is hardly languishing. Not everything needs a billion users and VC funding.

"...because everything runs js*"

Javascript runs on ~70% of all devices worldwide.

... And js is everywhere