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psf@psf@oldbytes.space (2026-08-05 16:31:00)
In their article "Malleable Software", Ink & Switch list various ways that modern software applications fail to serve the user:

Software is too rigid: users can’t tailor it to suit their workflow, except by entering the role of programmers.
Software applications are overspecialized "avocado slicers", not general tools like "knives", so their lack of tailorability is keenly felt.
Software doesn’t provide a reasonable learning curve from beginner to expert; in other words, time spent learning an application doesn’t unlock tailorability, instead the end user must learn an unrelated skill like a markup/scripting language or even the tool’s implementation language.
Software applications are increasingly siloed, so sharing data between apps, let alone orchestrating cross-app workflows, is overly difficult.
These are real problems.  From what I can tell, Ink & Switch are software researchers, and view the problems from a highly technical perspective, focusing on novel infrastructure that enables end-user programmability.  They pose questions such as "how do we ease users into programming?" and  "instead of shipping a dead, static binary, can we ship a living image containing programming tools allowing it to be modified in arbitrary ways while still running?" These ideas are technologically exquisite, but they fail to provide a gentle learning curve.

(cont'd) 🧵
---Reply---
dave@dthompson@toot.cat (2026-08-05 23:14:05)
@psf I think this misses some details in the ink & switch post. they use spreadsheets and hypercard as examples of extensible software that doesn't require what you'd generally consider "programming". hypercard specifically let you do a lot without programming but *also* let you write code if you wanted to. macros are good, but all this other stuff is, too.