Things have the quality that cannot be named if they were evolved from real use, not designed.

The quality that cannot be named is a concept from Christopher Alexander, for things that have a resonant wholeness to them.

You might call this sublime beauty.

This process is kind of like stable diffusion.

You take effectively random noise to start.

If it's viable, then you continuously evolve it.

You evolve and improve the parts that are most important (or most broken).

Over time it evolves from a random mess into something sublimely beautiful.

You can sense the souls of the swarm of users in the past who improved it and shaped it.

This gives the thing life and vitality.

Not in theory beautiful, in practice beautiful.

The beauty of viability and adaptability.

This process works extremely well if the curators have calibrated taste.

The curators can sculpt the random, messy underlying thing into a more beautiful version of itself.

The curator needs real-world, relevant experience to craft their taste in that domain.

A gardener will have better taste in gardening than a chef will in gardening.

Ecosystems that can maximize the indirect effects of the taste of their best users can create a ton of value.

Javascript is sublimely beautiful.

It was created in just 10 days!

The creator had experience in designing languages, but was given a last-minute constraint to make it look like Java.

The language was rough, and a bit odd… but it worked, and was affixed to an open, ubiquitous system, so it got tons of use.

And now Javascript (especially the Typescript variant) have evolved to be, if not a perfect language, at least a great one!

Sublimely beautiful!