Thread

1. dmdiefjeidnn · 1790567748 · focus · HN ↗

   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”.

   1. mickael-kerjean · 1790569099 · focus · HN ↗

      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] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mickael-kerjean&#x2F;filestash" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mickael-kerjean&#x2F;filestash

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