About
Beet is an engine for the act of creation. A student learning to code, a company delivering value and a person building tools to manage their own life are all doing the same thing, and beet's job is to serve them all with one broad, deep stack.
The name
Beet is short for Beetmash, a mispronunciation of Beat Match: a nod to the DJ heritage of Scratch, and to the goal of collaborative creation, beat matching projects in the spirit of communal creation. Along the way it also picked up a backronym, Behavior Expressed as Entity Trees, for its habit of describing behavior as plain scene hierarchies.
Beetmash is also the company that will eventually be built to serve this mission.
The lineage
The ideas behind beet are not new, and it stands in a long line of tools and thinkers:
- Seymour Papert and constructionism: learning is itself an act of creation, we come to understand the world by making things in it. Logo, Lego Mindstorms and Scratch brought this to students, and their spirit runs through beet.
- Smalltalk and HyperCard: software as something people reshape, not just run. A beet tool keeps its structure and behavior open as data for the same reason.
- Malleable software: Ink & Switch's essay names the qualities beet is built around, above all the gentle slope from user to creator.
- Game engines: the tradition of separating capability from behavior, an executable driven entirely by scene files. Beet is built on Bevy, the engine that carries this tradition from microcontrollers to the web.
The reading behind these ideas is collected below, and the blog follows the journey month by month.
References
Malleable software, learning through making, and simulation as a medium all have a long lineage, and the work below shapes the project's direction.
Malleable software
- 1967 - Marshall McLuhan - The Medium Is The Massage
- 2024 - Maggie Appleton - Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
- 2025 - Bryan Cantrill - The Complexity of Simplicity