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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
psf@oldbytes.space wrote:
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) 🧵