Malleable Computing

psf (@psf@oldbytes.space)

In their article ["Malleable Software"](https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/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) 🧵

Hedy - Textual programming made easy

Many schools and teachers around the world want to teach their students programming. Initially this is often done with playful tools, ranging from the Bee-Bot robot to Scratch Junior or Scratch. After using such tools, kids often want to move to more powerful, textual programming languages, like Python.

User-tailorable systems: pressing the issues with buttons

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Malleable software in the age of LLMs

All computer users may soon have the ability to author small bits of code. What structural changes does this imply for the production and distribution of software?

Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface

This draft was released March 15, 2006. Please email comments to bretworrydream.com. You can also download the PDF.

Ink & Switch malleable software essay

When I program, I personally prefer to be controlled by the tools I use. They were build for a reason, for a specific workflow. I want my program to typecheck. I dont want to have the freedom to write untyped programs. I don’t want git to also have the ability to crop images. At this specific moment, I want to perform a specific task and I want the tools to help me do it, nothing more complex , or annoying , that could allow me to shoot myself to the foot. Control is bliss. Control is bliss as ...

Substrates 2025 - Proceedings

This initial workshop of the Substrates community was held on June 3rd, 2025, hosted at the ‹Programming› 2025 Conference at Prague, Czechia.

As someone interested in providing more agency in our computing environment I am on the lookout for pieces of our current computing environments that can be enriched to provide a more malleable experience. Window management is an area that I keep coming back to given how prevalent the domain is. I will provide a recap of what window management is, how it’s used today, and how modern applications have evolved to deal with current deficiencies. Then I’ll provide a compositional approach for window management to move towards and discuss how I think this could make applications more malleable.

Malleable Systems Collective

The Malleable Systems Collective catalogs and experiments with malleable software and systems that reset the balance of power in computing

Infinite Canvas history

Explore infinite canvas tools that work the way we think

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Something Pretty Right: A History of Visual Basic | Retool

How Visual Basic became the world’s most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development.