# Philosophy

Farmers in the US are [hacking their modern tractors](https://netzpolitik.org/2017/usa-bauern-hacken-eigene-traktoren/) or are happy to [buy old tractors from the 70ies and 80ies](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvgx9w/farmers-are-buying-40-year-old-tractors-because-theyre-actually-repairable), because "they're actually repairable". In this spirit, Lively4 tries to find low-tech workflows for adapting, repairing, and evolving tools in a collaborative Self-sustaining development environment. We want to build tools and an environment that are as cheaply and directly hackable as we can get away with. We do not aim for a super end-user-friendly environment, and we don't want to discover the holy grail of the next end-user-friendly programming language. We would rather bring together the collaboration spirit of Wikis with its plain Markdown markup language and combine it with JavaScript scripts and custom HTML components in one environment. Allowing the use of JavaScript and HTML in Markdown, and Markdown and HTML in JavaScript, and Markdown in HTML. So we can glue and embed everything in everything and smooth everything over and allow the whole mix to be edited in a collaborative way, which should feel like editing a Wiki, but with the underlying backing and seriousness of a #GitHub repository. We therefore try to hide as many of the Git rituals as possible, replacing the pull, commit, merge, push sequences with #squash and #sync.