Catalog

Stefan Lesser A Future of Programming. 2019.

Enable everyone, especially people from other domains outside programming, to take advantage of computation. Empower people to build their own systems and tools, giving them more of the powers that have only been available to programmers through writing code, so they can augment their own workflows in their own areas of expertise.

Blur the line between developers and users. Enable people to modify the systems and tools they use and adapt them to their needs.

Michel Beaudouin-Lafon A World Without Apps. 2019.

…with apps today, you are given full, complex software where you don’t have a choice. You have to have all of it or none of it, and you have to learn it, and you have relearn it at each update, and you have learn a different version when you shift from one vendor to another. (7:35)

…the key idea here is to make tools more generic, general, and independent of the environment in which they are going to be used. (12:50)

I often think about this [Samuel Johnson] quote from my late stepfather’s desk: ‘Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.’ (20:51)

I also strongly believe that users should have a bit more control over security and the risks they are willing to take. We learn by doing, we learn by failing, we learn by doing mistakes, we learn by breaking things. And sometimes I want a secure environment and sometimes I want to see what happens if I put my fingers in the plug. (21:17)

I don’t think it is incompatible to have more flexible environments and security. What I’m advocating for is the ability for people to make choices. (23:24)

I do not believe that this type of change will come from the companies that dominate computing at the moment, in the same way that GUIs didn’t come out of IBM at the time. (30:43)

My take is not to try to directly address the wider audience, but to try with niche markets. (31:20)

Robin Sloan An app can be a home-cooked meal. 2020.

Additional Resources

I made a messaging app for, and with, my family. It is ruthlessly simple; we love it; no one else will ever use it.

In a better world, I would have built this in a day using some kind of modern, flexible HyperCard for iOS, exporting a sturdy, standalone app that did exactly what I wanted and nothing else.

People don’t only learn to cook so they can become chefs. Some do! But far more people learn to cook so they can eat better, or more affordably, or in a specific way. Or because they want to carry on a tradition. Sometimes they learn just because they’re bored! Or even because — get this — they love spending time with the person who’s teaching them… I will gently suggest that perhaps coding might be entangled the same way… with our domesticity and comfort, nerdiness and curiosity, health and love.

Andy Matuschak Armories for tool-maker/tool-user collaborations. 2021.

Describes a deeper, more intense 2-person alternative to ecologies for tailorable software (summarized in Philip Tchernavskij’s Designing and Programming Malleable Software.

Great tools for thought rarely come from contexts focused on creating tools. They’re usually created in the course of deep creative work in some domain, almost as a byproduct. And they’re usually made by people with significant expertise and investment in those creative problems.

In most domains, great tool-makers are rarely great tool-users, and vice-versa. There might be advantages to separating the work: the tool-maker could constantly consider abstraction and generalization, and the tool-user could focus on meaningful problems at hand without being distracted by issues of systematization.

There’s a tricky chicken-and-egg problem here. If great creative work should drive the invention of new mediums, how can the initial idea driving the creative work get started in the first place?

The pair must proactively develop an armory of tool ideas to equip the tool-user’s explorations. Tool ideas in the armory don’t have to be working software. They just have to be understood well enough that the tool-user can tinker with them in emerging creative projects.

This conception is mostly useful in the context of repeated collaborations, particularly across distinct projects.

Andrea A. diSessa Harold Abelson Boxer: a reconstructible computational medium. 1986.

One major benefit of programmability is that even professionally produced items become changeable, adaptable, fragmentable, and quotable in ways that present software is not.

… a reconstructible medium should allow people to build personalized computational tools and easily modify tools they have gotten from others. This concept is in strong contrast to the current situation in applications software — professionals are designing tools only for large populations with a common need.

Boxer challenges, in a small way, the current view of programming languages. More significantly, it challenges the current view of what programming might be like, and for whom and for what purposes programming languages should be created. We have argued that some computer languages should be designed for laypeople, and have presented an image of how computation could be used as the basis for a popular, expressive, and reconstructible medium. Computers will become substantially more powerful instruments of educational and social change to the extent that such an image can be realized.

Geoffrey Litt Bring Your Own Client. 2021.

Today we generally think about BYOC at the “app” level. But can we go finer-grained than that, picking individual interface elements? Instead of needing to pick a single email client, can I compose my favorite email client out of an inbox, a compose window, and a spam filter?

Geoffrey Litt Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software. 2019.

Among major software platforms today, browser extensions are the rare exception that allow and encourage users to modify the apps that we use, in creative ways not intended by their original developers. On smartphone and desktop platforms, this sort of behavior ranges from unusual to impossible, but in the browser it’s an everyday activity.

Since the beginning of personal computing, there’s been a philosophical tradition that encourages using computers as an interactive medium where people contribute their own ideas and build their own tools—authorship over consumption.

Stephen Kell Convivial Design Heuristics for Software Systems. 2020.

Consider how many web applications contain their own embedded ‘rich text’ editing widget. If linking were truly at the heart of the web’s design, a user (not just a developer) could supply their own preferred editor easily, but such a feat is almost always impossible. A convivial system should not contain multitudes; it should permit linking to them.

The battle for convivial software in this sense appears similar to other modern struggles, such as the battle to avert climate disaster. Relying on local, individual rationality alone is a losing game: humans lack the collective consciousness that collective rationality would imply, and much human activity happens as the default result of ‘normal behaviour’. To shift this means to shift what is normal. Local incentives will play their part, but social doctrines, whether relatively transactional notions such as intergenerational contract, or quasi-spiritual notions of our evolved bond with the planet, also seem essential if there is to be hope of steering humans away from collective destruction.

Q Crochet. 2021 – present.

Crochet is a tool for creating and remixing interactive stories, safely.

Additional Resources

What's Crochet: A general description of the Crochet programming system
Design Philosophy: Principles that guide Crochet

Crochet goes to great lengths to make creating, running and remixing content as safe and privacy respecting as possible. Content built with Crochet can only use your computer and your data in ways you explicitly consent to—it can’t change your files or send your information over the internet without your knowledge and consent.

One of the core principles of Crochet is that you should feel safe to experiment with your computer as much as you want, without having to worry about questions like: “If I install this application, will it try to steal my files?” or “What if I try this and it breaks my computer?”

Crochet is a “language-driven” system, through the lenses that we interact with computational concepts through languages; Even “direct manipulation” forms a language, where the ways in which we can manipulate things is dictated by a set of composable rules. A system like this, heavily dependent on tooling, needs ways in which users can extend the system to fit their own context. This means that Crochet has to support user-extensible IDEs, user-extensible Debuggers, user-extensible REPLs, etc. And these users should be able to modify any aspect of these tools to fit new languages (interactions, manipulations, rules, etc).

Philip Tchernavskij Designing and Programming Malleable Software. 2019.

The contemporary landscape of interactive software operates as a “designer-knows-best” model that gives users very few opportunities to change their software or to make different pieces of software work together as they see fit.

I introduce malleable software as a design vision that reconstructs the goals of tailorable systems with pluralism as a guiding value. Malleable software is made up of interface elements untangled from the closed worlds of apps, which can be developed by different authors and (re-)combined by end users.

Bret Victor Josh Horowitz Luke Iannini Toby Schachman Paula Te Virginia McArthur Dynamicland. 2017 – present.

Dynamicland is a communal computer, designed for agency, not apps, where people can think like whole humans.

No normal person sees an app and thinks ‘I can make that myself.’ Or even ‘I can modify that to do what I actually need.’ Computational media in Dynamicland feels like stuff anyone can make. … A humane dynamic medium gently leads people down a path from playing, to crafting, to remixing, to programming.

Dynamicland is an authoring environment, and everyone is an author. People make what they need for themselves. They learn through immersion. The true power of the dynamic medium — programmability — is for everyone.

Ink & Switch End-user programming. 2019.

Desktop programs, web apps, and smartphone apps are to various degrees like appliances with a hermetic seal to keep users out of their interior. If there is not already a button for a given function, the only option for users is to petition the developer.

There shouldn’t be a chasm that the user has to cross in order to customize the behavior of their software. Going from using to inspecting to modifying the system should be a gradual process where each of the steps is small enough to be easily discoverable. The user should not need to switch to “programmer mindset” but instead stay within the context of the application. They can stay close to their work and their ideas.

feenk Glamorous Toolkit. 2017 – present.

A development environment built on top of Pharo, a modern successor of Smalltalk.

Glamorous Toolkit is the moldable development environment. It is a live notebook. It is a flexible search interface. It is a fancy code editor. It is a software analysis platform. It is a data visualization engine. All in one. And it is free and open-source under an MIT license.

We want the environment to fit the context of the current system and when it does not, we want to be able to mold it live. This seemingly small change is transformational and can be utilized in many ways.

Whatever is shown on the screen is rendered in one single rendering tree. No canvas in between. That means that all layouts are regular layouts, including the graph layouts and text-editor layouts. That means that text is made of regular elements. And that means that all elements can be combinable without imposing a technical limit.

Richard Stallman contributors GNU Emacs. 1976 – present.

Extensible means that you can go beyond simple customization and create entirely new commands. New commands are simply programs written in the Lisp language, which are run by Emacs’s own Lisp interpreter. Existing commands can even be redefined in the middle of an editing session, without having to restart Emacs. Most of the editing commands in Emacs are written in Lisp; the few exceptions could have been written in Lisp but use C instead for efficiency. — GNU Emacs manual, Introduction

Org can be used as a TODO lists manager and as a planner. Org is a great plain-text table editor. Org is an authoring and publication tool. Org makes literate programming a handy and natural way to deal with code. — Org mode feature list

This appendix covers some areas where users can extend the functionality of Org. — Org mode manual, Appendix A Hacking

Bill Atkinson Dan Winkler HyperCard team at Apple HyperCard. 1987 – 2004.

HyperCard is a software erector set that lets non-programmers put together interactive information — Bill Atkinson, Computer Chronicles (1987)

HyperCard’s biggest win was a very low entry threshold for those who wanted to build their own ‘stacks’ - combinations of user interface, code, and persistent data. There were plenty of examples to suggest ideas, and all the code was open for tweaking. — Tim Oren, A Eulogy for HyperCard (2004)

Stephen Kell (owner) J. Ryan Stinnett (contributor) liballocs. 2011 – present.

Meta-level run-time services for Unix processes… a.k.a. dragging Unix into the 1980s

Unix abstractions are fairly simple and fairly general, but they are not humane, and they invite fragmentation. By ‘not humane’, I mean that they are error-prone and difficult to experiment with interactively. By ‘fragmentation’, I mean they invite building higher-level abstractions in mutually opaque and incompatible ways (think language VMs, file formats, middlewares…). To avoid these, liballocs is a minimal extension of Unix-like abstractions broadly in the spirit of Smalltalk-style dynamism, designed to counter both of these problems.

Benjamin B. Bederson James D. Hollan Pad++: a zooming graphical interface for exploring alternate interface physics. 1994.

A zoomable graphical sketchpad. Documentation and more information can be found here.

… Pad++, an infinite resolution sketchpad that we are exploring as an alternative to traditional window and icon-based approaches to interface design.

There are numerous benefits to metaphor-based approaches, but they also lead designers to employ computation primarily to mimic mechanisms of older media. While there are important cognitive, cultural, and engineering reasons to exploit earlier successful representations, this approach has the potential of underutilizing the mechanisms of new media.

We envision a much richer world of dynamic persistent informational entities that operate according to multiple physics specifically designed to provide cognitively facile access. The physics need to be designed to exploit semantic relationships explicit and implicit in information-intensive tasks and in our interaction with these new kinds of computationally-based work materials.

Alan Kay Dan Ingalls Adele Goldberg Learning Research Group of Xerox PARC Smalltalk. 1972 – present.

A programming language and in-context development environment with powerful built-in tools like a class browser, object inspector, and debugger.

The message is the most fundamental language construct in Smalltalk. Even control structures are implemented as message sends. — Wikipedia

The late-bound, message-based interfaces of objects provide strong interposability properties: clients remain oblivious of the speciﬁc implementation they are talking to. In turn, this simpliﬁes the customisation, extension or replacement of parts of a system, all of which can be rendered as interposition of a different object on the same client. — Stephen Kell, The operating system: should there be one? (2013)

Yoshiki Schmitz Software as a “place”. 2019.

What makes a piece of software a “place” vs a “tool” or an “appliance”? … I think some notion of limitlessness and nesting are necessary. [The feeling of a “place”] seems to come from some kind of limitlessness: Notion has infinite hierarchies, Figma has an infinite canvas. … This definition matters to me because appliances are static, but places can be occupied and changed. You can have memories and experiences in them. Things can grow in them. New stuff can emerge. Communities can form. I want more software to be like that.

Paul Chiusano The future of software, the end of apps, and why UX designers should care about type theory. 2013.

Software is now organized into static machines called applications. These applications (“appliances” is a better word) come equipped with a fixed vocabulary of actions, speak no common language, and cannot be extended, composed, or combined with other applications except with enormous friction.

Applications can and ultimately should be replaced by programming environments, explicitly recognized as such, in which the user interactively creates, executes, inspects and composes programs.

Applications are failing at even their stated goal, but they do worse than that. Yes, an application is an (often terrible) interface to some library of functions, but it also traps this wonderful collection of potential building blocks in a mess of bureaucratic red tape.

No one piece of software ‘does it all’, and so individuals and businesses looking to automate or partially automate various tasks are often put in the position of having to integrate functionality across multiple applications, which is often painful or flat out impossible. The amount of lost productivity (or lost leisure time) on a global scale, both for individuals and business, is absolutely staggering.

As a civilization, we would be better off if software could be developed by small, unrelated groups, with an open standard that allowed for these groups to trivially combine functionality produced anywhere on the network.

The problem is, I don’t want a machine, I want a toolkit, and Google keeps trying to sell me machines. Perhaps these machines are exquisitely crafted, with extensive tuning and so forth, but a machine with a fixed set of actions can never do all the things that I can imagine might be useful, and I don’t want to wait around for Google to implement the functionality I desire as another awkward one-off ‘feature’ that’s poorly integrated and just adds more complexity to an already bloated application.

Stephen Kell The mythical matched modules: overcoming the tyranny of inflexible software construction. 2009.

Conventional tools yield expensive and inflexible software. … I propose that a solution must radically separate the concern of integration in software: firstly by using novel tools specialised towards integration (the “integration domain"), and secondly by prohibiting use of preexisting interfaces (“interface hiding”) outside that domain.

Placing high-level tool support for integration and adaptation close to the user, for example within web application mashup platforms and browser extensions has already led to added-value innovations which could not have been anticipated by the creators of the underlying software.

Weiwei Xu The “Space” of Computing. 2018.

Our conception of “computing” has changed and continues to change. This work identifies dimensions that constitute the “space of computing”.

Currently, only those who have a programming background or resources have the ability to create digital artifacts. This forces the rest of the world to be consumers, rather than creators or authors. When creating digital products, our conception of target audience is “users”. The notion of “users” sometimes assumes that their main goal is consuming instead of playing, creating, or conversing. What if the digital environment was inclusive enough for anyone to create? How can we provide the tools that will enable everyone to become authors?

Allan MacLean Kathleen Carter Lennart Lövstrand Thomas Moran User-tailorable systems: pressing the issues with buttons. 1990.

It is impossible to design systems which are appropriate for all users and all situations. We believe that a useful technique is to have end users tailor their systems to match their personal work practices. This requires not only systems which can be tailored, but a culture within which users feel in control of the system and in which tailoring is the norm.

It is worth emphasising that we are interested here in skills required for tailoring. We do not intend to suggest that a ‘programmer’ is more skilled than a ‘worker’ in any absolute sense. If we were to focus on skills in the work domain, we would find that the worker was most skilled and the programmer least skilled.

As a first step in growing a tailoring culture, we claim that it should be as easy to change the environment as it is to use it (clearly all changes one might want to make will not be so easy - but it is important that some should be).

A remarkable amount of tailoring can be done by relying on buttons produced by other people. Buttons can be kept in documents and can be easily passed around by email, thus they are a tool for the user community to augment the Xerox Lisp environment by combining individual innovation and by sharing improvements with others. The fact that small-grain improvements can easily ‘diffuse’ throughout the user community is a powerful principle for supporting user-driven evolution of systems.

Kartik Agaram Using computers more freely and safely. 2023.

Manifesto for Freewheeling Apps and experience report in trying to create situated software. Argues for building situated software out of situated tools that are parsimonious in dependencies and infrequently updated.

Prefer software:

with thousands rather than millions of users

that seldom requires updates

that spawns lots of forks

that is easy to modify

that you can modify

Clemens N. Klokmose James R. Eagan Siemen Baader Wendy Mackay Michel Beaudouin-Lafon Webstrates: Shareable Dynamic Media. 2015.

Webstrates offer a novel approach for creating shareable dynamic media that blur the distinction between documents and applications. Our vision requires software to be malleable by users, so they can appropriate documents and tools to meet individual needs; shareable among users, so they can collaborate on multiple aspects of the media; and distributable across heterogeneous devices and platforms.

By sharing embedded code, behavior typically associated with application software can also be (collaboratively) manipulated, opening the way to novel possibilities for combining content, computation and interaction. Webstrates can be composed by embedding one webstrate within another, a process called transclusion [Nelson 1995], that lets users truly share, rather than copy, content.

Antranig Basman Philip Tchernavskij What Lies in the Path of the Revolution. 2018.

We argue that a form of “digital serfdom” has rapidly grown up around us, where various important classes of artefacts, increasingly essential for everyday life, including participation in political and economic life, cannot be effectively owned by ordinary individuals.

Many of the technological barriers to ownership, especially as regards software, can be seen as embedded in certain questions of “reuse” — one of the central affordances of ownership is the ability to transplant a thing from its original location to a different one, following the desires or person of the owner. For most kinds of software this is possible in only a crude way — an “application” can be installed on one machine rather than another — and with the rising prevalence of rental or cloud-based models for the deployment of software, it is decreasingly possible at all.

If you find a piece of software that does something of value to you, it should be possible to make it your own. This implies that you can keep using it as part of the collection of tools you carry with you, in familiar contexts, or experiment with using it in novel contexts.

Geoffrey Litt Daniel Jackson Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications. 2020.

In this paper, we present spreadsheet-driven customization, a technique that enables end users to customize software without doing any traditional programming. The idea is to augment an application’s UI with a spreadsheet that is synchronized with the application’s data. When the user manipulates the spreadsheet, the underlying data is modified and the changes are propagated to the UI, and vice versa.

Generic tools are especially important for software customization, because a common barrier to customizing software is not having enough time [Mackay 1991]—it’s more likely that people will customize software frequently if they can reuse the same tools across many applications.

One of the most interesting properties of spreadsheets is that users familiar with only a tiny sliver of their functionality (e.g., storing tables of numbers and computing simple sums) can still use them in valuable ways. This supports the user’s natural motivation to continue using the tool, and to eventually learn its more powerful features if needed [Nardi and Miller 1991].

Projects, papers, and discussions

People and groups

Antranig Basman

Clemens N. Klokmose

James R. Eagan

Geoffrey Litt

Ink & Switch

J. Ryan Stinnett

Philip Tchernavskij

Stephen Kell

Weiwei Xu

Yoshiki Schmitz