Malleable Systems Collective digest — 2024
Hello newsletter subscribers! We seem to send only 1 message per year, so you may have signed up a long time ago. 😅 In case you've forgotten, the Malleable Systems Collective discusses and experiments with extensibility for user empowerment.
2024 is drawing to a close. It's time for our annual digest of collective activities over the past year!
Discourse
Our Discourse-based forum continues to be our most active communication medium. If you're not already on the forum, please do check it out.
Here are some of the topics we discussed:
- Small Virtual Machines
- Collapse Computing
- Alan Kay's Quora dialogues and the philosophical dilemma of Systems thinking
- Shouldn't the phone be our target?
- Feedback on a malleable operating system
- Rethinking the object-oriented paradigm - what can we throw away?
- Taking Alan Kay's vision to the extreme
- Bootstrappable Software
- The Brutalist Programming Manifesto
- The Mystery of Moose
- Objects as Records vs Activities
- Spaces of Data
- Reversibility
- A programming environment with first class categories
- Decker
- Point-Free Logic Programming
- Micro-PROLOG
- Modal
- folk.computer
- Modules vs Centers: Thinking about Christopher Alexander's Thought in Software
- Nova: Multiset Rewriting Language
Matrix
Our Matrix room remains active as well.
Here's a summary of interesting conversation topics from our room this year:
- Programming for the Planet (PROPL) workshop
- Autonomous cells, self-organisation
- LLMs in conflict with malleability
- Linked data, fediverse
- Target users: tinkerers vs. consumers
- Evaluating projects in relative terms
- Software complexity
- Browser extension, construction kit
- Wasm's potential
- Orion's DOM to canvas prototype
- Incremental build systems
- Evaluation framework
- Damaged Earth Catalog
- UI design: search, toolbar, command palette
- Natto
- Aarhus conference, computing conflict
- Typed polyglot environments
- Workflows for domain experts
- "Circuit board"-style extension host
- Joel's self-sustainability thesis
- Maggie's "home-cooked software"
- Webstrates as local-first software
- Convivial computing origin
- Example of user empowerment
- Video game development experience, Arcan
Challenge problem
This year, we tried out a "challenge problem" focused on fearless extensibility. Our community pondered this topic for several months and contributed many interesting submissions. Overall, I think it was quite successful and hopefully we'll run a similar event in the future for another topic.
Looking ahead
Are there other activities you'd like our community to try out in the future? We're still a small group all things considered... Should we attempt to more actively publicise our existence somehow? Please share your thoughts.
— J. Ryan Stinnett