I remember having this idea in undergrad in 2011. My big wish was that every app would ship with a scripting language or an api. The problem is that it’s not at all straight forward to do this. The more complex an app, the more important a facade (like a front end) becomes.
Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
11–20 of 117 posts
Re: Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
#12I love the optimism, but I'm a pessimist. Even at the first paragraph: > "The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay—a malleable material that users could reshape at will. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. When your tools don’t work the way you need them to, you submit feedback and hope for the best. You’re forced to adapt your workflow to fit your software, when…
> Windows was a wildly malleable piece of software in the 90s and 2000s, and it didn't exactly win love for it.
Is that so? I remember the custom styling options in Win98 and ME/2000 still very fondly. And there were lots of people who invested effort in making their own color schemes, meticulously assembling personal toolbars in Office, etc. (The enthusiasm went away the first time you had to reinstall and were faced with the choice of doing it all again or sticking with the defaults. But I'd chalk this up to Windows not treating the customization data as important enough to provide backup/export functionality, not that people didn't want to customize)
The features increasingly went away in later Windows and Office versions, but I assumed it was some corporate decision. Was there ever actual backlash from users against those features?
Re: Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
#13There are people who like to tinker, to play with things, take them apart, learn how they work, put them back together again. Some of them go on to make new things. A few of them will make things that change the world. I'd like to live in a world that does more to encourage imagination and creativity, that lets people participate in creating their future. Software doesn't all have to be black boxes with No User Serviceable Parts Inside. We've seen what people can do with things like HyperCard, Visual Basic, Excel. And have fun doing it.
Re: Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
#14The challenges here feel insurmountable, but I can't help but feel there's a certain inevitability to the de-monolithization de-totalization of the domain of computing being ensconced so wholly as it is inside of applications, experiences purely pre-defined by a given app. Already with AI we are seeing a huge uptick in people's expectations that agents operate across apps. The app is losing its monopoly of power, is…
I agree, I feel like the authors are underestimating the effect the new AI is already having on the concept of local software crafting. For my entire lifetime, I've had friends ask me to help them build software that accesses some data somewhere, and I've always had to turn them down because there are too many unknowns.
I've spent countless hours thinking about how to build a business that would solve some class of problems my friends have encountered and I've almost always had to conclude that the business would probably not be profitable, so their ideas were never tested.
Now, with a 2025 chatbot, I can confidently estimate the feasibility of a basic project in minutes and we can build the thing together in hours. No one needs to make a profit, build a new business, or commit to ongoing maintenance. Locally crafted software is taking off dramatically and I think it will become the new normal.
Re: Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if I may continue my pessimistic outlook, I would simply say that anyone can cook, but not everyone can cook. Programmers are chefs - we take ingredients called SDKs and serve them up into meals called custom software. Anyone who isn't a chef, might need to buy the packaged cake mix at Walmart. For something as complex as software, it's sad, but it's almost... okay? Every industry has gone through this; there w…
I gotta say I don’t understand your point about cooking — billions of people who aren’t professional chefs cook meals every day! These meals may not live up to restaurant standards but they have different virtues — like making it taste just the way you like it, or carrying on a family tradition. On that note, Robin Sloan has a beautiful post about software as a home cooked meal… https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-…
Also adding that software only being inflexible due to being mass-produced is the state of the pre-Enshittification era that we already left behind.
Since the last decade or so at the latest, software is often designed as an explicit means of power over users and applications are made deliberately inflexible to, e.g. corece users to watch ads, purchase goods or services or simply stay at the screen for longer than intended.
(Even that was already the case in niches, especially "shareware". But in a sense, all commercial software is shareware now)
Re: Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
#16A tool which looks at this sort of thing which was mentioned here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44118159 but which didn't seem to get much traction is: https://pontus.granstrom.me/scrappy/ but it pretty much only works for JavaScript programmers and their friends (or folks interested in learning JavaScript). Other tools which I'd like to put forward as meriting discussion in this context include: - L…
First two links right now both go to Scrappy, but your text makes it sound like you are contrasting different things?
Re: Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
#17I wish that the first semester of programming class deliberately left code out of the material. IMHO students should start with something like this short list:
FileMaker/Microsoft Access/HyperCard (no longer exists)
Macromedia Flash (no longer exists)
Spreadsheets (like Microsoft Excel, unfortunately Airtable isn't there yet?)
Wix (maybe? surely there are better alternatives)
Zapier (or an open source version)
htmx
Firebase/RethinkDB (no longer maintained?)
Erlang/Go
GNU Octave/MATLAB
Lisp/Scheme/PostScript/Clojure
React
Ruby on Rails
Javascript (warts of the modern version with classes and async/await, not the original)
C#/Java/C++/Rust (the dangers of references/pointers and imperative programming)
iOS/Android (Swift vs Objective-C, Kotlin vs Java, ill-conceived APIs, etc)
Since we can't fix the market domination of multibillion companies who don't care about this stuff on any reasonable timescale, maybe we can pull the wool off the children's eyes and give them the tools to tear down the status quo.
I suspect that AI and geopolitical forces may take this decision away from us though. It may already be too late. In that case, we could start with spiritual teachings around philosophy, metaphysics and wisdom to give them the tools needed to work with nonobjective and nondeterministic tech that's indistinguishable from magic.
Re: Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
#18I love the optimism, but I'm a pessimist. Even at the first paragraph: > "The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay—a malleable material that users could reshape at will. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. When your tools don’t work the way you need them to, you submit feedback and hope for the best. You’re forced to adapt your workflow to fit your software, when…
> Windows was a wildly malleable piece of software in the 90s and 2000s, and it didn't exactly win love for it. Is that so? I remember the custom styling options in Win98 and ME/2000 still very fondly. And there were lots of people who invested effort in making their own color schemes, meticulously assembling personal toolbars in Office, etc. (The enthusiasm went away the first time you had to reinstall and were face…
Tech-oriented people love software malleability and also can handle the responsibility - e.g. understanding something that's broken + customized by you could have been broken by you.
Non tech-oriented people, the masses, absolutely love customizability and malleability--but aren't willing to handle the responsibility. They will reach out to tech support who can't possibly know every customization option of every application and its effects, and complain when they tell them to reset/reinstall.
And in a corporate environment where the company provides the PC, the company would rather not deal with it. Office dominates at the workplace, is mostly making money from corporate users, and users want it to behave the same way it does in the workplace. So any backlash by users is simply not going to matter unless it might cause companies to not renew their licenses.
A company I work for is moving to Office-on-the-web for PCs that are used by people who don't really use Office that much except possibly to read Word docs, in order to save on licensing costs I presume. It's even less customizable than any desktop version. So the trend is going to continue.
Re: Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if I may continue my pessimistic outlook, I would simply say that anyone can cook, but not everyone can cook. Programmers are chefs - we take ingredients called SDKs and serve them up into meals called custom software. Anyone who isn't a chef, might need to buy the packaged cake mix at Walmart. For something as complex as software, it's sad, but it's almost... okay? Every industry has gone through this; there w…
I gotta say I don’t understand your point about cooking — billions of people who aren’t professional chefs cook meals every day! These meals may not live up to restaurant standards but they have different virtues — like making it taste just the way you like it, or carrying on a family tradition. On that note, Robin Sloan has a beautiful post about software as a home cooked meal… https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-…
First thanks for the original article and it is great to know a team is going deep on this.
I am a bit fed up with software less because of malleablity but because of the cloud walled gardens. I can't open my Google doc in something else like I can a pdf in different programs. Not without exporting it.
This for me interested and I found remotestorage.io which looks very promising. I like the idea that I buy my 100gb of could storage from wherever then compose the apps I want to use around it.
I hadn't thought of malleable software... that's a whole other dimension! Thanks for introducing this as a concept worth talking about. Of course I have heard of elisp and used excel but haven't thought of it front and centre.
In terms of cooking ... I feel like cooking is easier potentially as for the most part (some exceptions) if I know the food hygiene and how to cook stuff then it is an additive process. Chicken plus curry plus rice. Software is like this too until it isn't. The excel docs do a great simple budget but not a full accounting suite. With the latter you get bogged down in fixing bugs in the sheet as you try to use it.
I think it is good you are researching as these could be solvable problems probably for many cases.
Something I have always thought about is sometimes it matter less if the software is open source than if the file format is. Then people can extend by building more around the file format. A tool might work on part of the format where an app works on all of it. I use free tools to sign PDFs for example.
Re: Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
#20A tool which looks at this sort of thing which was mentioned here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44118159 but which didn't seem to get much traction is: https://pontus.granstrom.me/scrappy/ but it pretty much only works for JavaScript programmers and their friends (or folks interested in learning JavaScript). Other tools which I'd like to put forward as meriting discussion in this context include: - L…
First two links right now both go to Scrappy, but your text makes it sound like you are contrasting different things?
I meant to note that Scrappy was discussed at the first link and then to provide the actual link --- my apologies if that wasn't clear.