Perfect Software - Software for an Audience of One

We have many names to describe personal tools. Malleable software speaks to how it behaves. Home-cooked software speaks to who makes it.

Geoffrey Litt

Welcome! I work on malleable software: computing environments where anyone can adapt their software to meet their needs with minimal friction. To see what that means to me, read this essay or listen to this interview.

Malleable software

computing environments where anyone can mold their tools to their own unique needs.That definition is by [[Geoffrey Litt]], who wrote [[Malleable software ...

Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs.

Patchwork Notebook

Internal notes from our ongoing research into soft, softer and softest software

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) 🧵

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 ...

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