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  • Yet another one rediscovers the way Lisp machines, Smalltalk, Cedar and Oberon were envisioned, and we never really got it in mainstream computing.

    Nice article.

    by pjmlp
  • NGL, whenever I work with Cocoa APIs, I wistfully think of another timeline where we get a system-level SmallTalk style REPL and ecosystem accessing all of it.
    by kickingvegas
  • I genuinely do wonder why that has been the trajectory. When you look at the almost futuristic vision of interacting with living, programmable software objects and environments that evolve over time and you get a glimpse of it in Emacs, Pharo or Oberon (worth mentioning Free Oberon, fun to play around with https://free.oberon.org/en/ think it was on the frontpage recently), how did we go back to dead text files again?

    I always have to think the "the world if" meme when I think about what would have happened if the whole Engelbart, Licklider, Alan Kay school of thought had won out

    by Barrin92
  • I love emacs
    by 4b11b4
  • This sort of thing is why the terminal commands pbpaste and pbcopy in NeXTstep/Mac OS X as well as Services are so powerful.

    That said, I wonder what the successor to emacs looks like (or what the next generation of it will improve).

    by WillAdams
  • Great 'scratch my own itch' story and I like the framing of Emacs and Elisp as Malleable Software.
    by mark_l_watson
  • AutoHotkey adds a malleable computing layer to Windows.
    by cfiggers
  • Meh, it's better than nothing. Though not a great interface or DSL.
    by paulryanrogers
  • I'm preparing a talk on malleable software for a product management audience, and I've noticed just how hard of a concept it is to grasp outside of engineering.

    Us engineers are used to the tools we use being flexible. It's only as we need tooling to be palatable to other audiences they become more constrained. For non technical people, malleable may as well mean complicated.

    We're going to see this change, but breaking this concept out of engineering is an uphill battle.

    by jacobfromrough
  • There’s an interesting middle ground: not fully malleable software, where the end user has full customisation ability but requires full programming skill, but eg the Unix tool model where prebuilt utilities can be composed with a simple syntax.

    Pre-existing (or importable) ELisp functions are kinda similar, just a slightly higher level of user skill.

    by __d
  • Another approach to this is "build mechanism, not policy" (also of Unix philosophy fame).

    Encapsulate the hard parts in libraries, ship the topmost layer as codegen templates that depend on those libraries, and let agents / devs modify that topmost layer to their heart's content. This often beats putting everything in libraries and having to expose customization points everywhere.

    This is the approach taken by the Shadcn UI library (which became popular just as agents entered the scene), but it generalizes far beyond UI.

    by miki123211
  • OP here. Happy to answer any questions about my post in this thread.
    by kickingvegas
  • Could you elaborate on BIBO? The wiki article is a bit above my pay grade
    by sroerick
  • Did you look into the existing org-sync package? I know the use case is slightly different but I think it still works.
    by tgbugs
  • Out of curiosity, are you now or have you ever been a "Mac person"? I'm curious if you've ever gone down the rabbit hole on Apple's history of technologies for what I think you'd call "malleable computing" at the OS level, like Open Scripting Architecture/AppleScript and now App Intents?
    by CharlesW
  • Great article, TIL vtable.

    Amazing how much value you got with 400 LoC (even though it's relying on multiple libraries).

    by AloysB
  • This is nice but not even a mention of the rather robust existing solution here with Magit Forge?

    https://github.com/magit/forge

    by beepbooptheory
  • > For Markdown to Org translation, Pandoc will be used.

    Hmm, pandoc? Surely....

        M-x org-import-<TAB>
    Damn, why does this family of functions not yet exist?
    by frumiousirc
  • JavaScript did this for the Web back in the day. I work on a malleable git-compatible SCM right now. First I put all the performance-critical parts into a native lib, then happily built my own git(hub) in JavaScript. Tastes differ, someone else may build it completely differently. I believe this is the right architecture for the LLM age.

    https://github.com/gritzko/beagle

    by gritzko
  • I love the look of the status output.
    by NetOpWibby
  • This is a good discussion of these principles. Largely inspired by Emacs, I built an interpreted lisp which runs in a web server and stores the AST Postgres. It gives me this kind of malleable computing and a Lispy feel with very little overhead.

    Instead of calling an API, agents can just use functions in a REPL. They can also write new views and improve the program if they run into an issue. Honestly, pretty amazing stuff.

    Being able to design a program specifically for the workflow I want is pretty neat. There's some vibeslop jank, but Emacs is a little bit jank too.

    by sroerick
  • This sounds so cool! Do you have this shared somewhere?
    by dharmatech