I always find these ideas funny. Been working with computers for decades and never once have I thought software “malleable”. Maybe back when I had to actually type the program into my Speccy to get anything to work… but then again it wasn’t a “let’s make software malleable” situation, it was more of a “this is how we can distribute software right now” type of thing.
Software was never malleable. User agency is a tale you tell yourselves to try and justify your rose-tinted glasses. Could things be better in computer world? Absolutely. But you could’ve ask us the same way back then and the answer would still be “absolutely”.
Malleability is a great answer to avoid the death by a thousand feature where you bloat your software because a company asked for something 99% of your users don't care about. That's the path I went with for my open source work with plugins that can run from a wasm runtime to prevent those from doing crazy things [1]. Unsurprisingly plugins represent more than 10x the code than what the core provides.
Our software is already malleable in a bunch of ways: APIs, integrations, extensions, plugins and compatible formats (eg lots of programs can edit a .md file). But all of this stuff is special-cased. Every program that wants to read a .psd has to write its own - probably buggy - parser. I can't just take the data in application A as JSON - at least not without claude. And I can't connect applications A and B and have them bidirectionally sync except with hacky scripts which will break in lots of situations.
That’s… not a valid point. eMacs whole point is being “malleable”, but the point is that not every software has to be, and they never have been by default.
Its quite reasonable to assume a future operating system could take on the malleability of emacs? That would make it the default. Just because it hasn’t doesn’t mean it can’t be.
Discussed at the time:
Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44237881 - June 2025 (114 comments)
I always find these ideas funny. Been working with computers for decades and never once have I thought software “malleable”. Maybe back when I had to actually type the program into my Speccy to get anything to work… but then again it wasn’t a “let’s make software malleable” situation, it was more of a “this is how we can distribute software right now” type of thing.
Software was never malleable. User agency is a tale you tell yourselves to try and justify your rose-tinted glasses. Could things be better in computer world? Absolutely. But you could’ve ask us the same way back then and the answer would still be “absolutely”.
Malleability is a great answer to avoid the death by a thousand feature where you bloat your software because a company asked for something 99% of your users don't care about. That's the path I went with for my open source work with plugins that can run from a wasm runtime to prevent those from doing crazy things [1]. Unsurprisingly plugins represent more than 10x the code than what the core provides.
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
Sure, but the point is to try and fix that.
Our software is already malleable in a bunch of ways: APIs, integrations, extensions, plugins and compatible formats (eg lots of programs can edit a .md file). But all of this stuff is special-cased. Every program that wants to read a .psd has to write its own - probably buggy - parser. I can't just take the data in application A as JSON - at least not without claude. And I can't connect applications A and B and have them bidirectionally sync except with hacky scripts which will break in lots of situations.
I love the idea of fixing that.
Weird, I use emacs and form it as I please, and I do have agency. The way you describe it, I don't exist.
That’s… not a valid point. eMacs whole point is being “malleable”, but the point is that not every software has to be, and they never have been by default.
Its quite reasonable to assume a future operating system could take on the malleability of emacs? That would make it the default. Just because it hasn’t doesn’t mean it can’t be.