malleable.systems is on HN now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22857551. People really missing what its about methinks.

yeah … as usual the comments have been less than relevant / interesting

HN is easy and fashionable to diss, but I found this thread useful. Yes you have to filter, and yes you need some flame-retardant underwear at times, but if you're willing to sift through you get some gems. Here I'll highlight https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22860549 as surfacing a steelman question I hadn't considered before. One way to keep things malleable is to minimize dependencies. But how do you encourage people messing with your system to also minimize dependencies so they avoid making the sorts of messes Excel is known for?

"People really missing what it's about" Welcome to the industry :)

Thread was rather ruined by guy from MintData adspamming replies... I agree though that the comments were very helpful, mainly in highlighting things I strongly disagree with. Many of their complaints boil down roughly to "non-programmers will get programming wrong", however they display a stunning arrogance that ignores the fact that programmers are likely to get the actual problem at hand wrong. This apparently isn't an issue. e.g. this guy https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=mbrodersen - "The real world is complex. The problems software solve in the real world are complex. Economics, sales, politics, personalities, random world events, competition etc. has always and will always be a force pushing software development in non-ideal directions." ie. the genuine reality of the world is likely to interfere with the ideal design of the program!! The solution is that the person who is genuinely understands the issue (the lawyer, the doctor, the plumber) needs to hand control over to a programmer who knows nothing about the actual problem... Sometimes programmers forget that their only particular skill is being talented at operating a specific kind of gizmo (a microprocessor). It's like yo-yoists suddenly declared themselves the kings of the world because of their unnatural ability of getting yo-yos to do what they want. Basically this guy is so close but so far. He sees himself as fundamentally different from a doctor, due to his ability to reason clearly about the world. But this is wrong. The doctor is likely better at reasoning about medicine than him. He is only better at getting a processor to reflect his mental model, because he is skilled in manipulating this gizmo. The thing they miss is; they are all "end-users" from some perspective. Are they writing x86 directly? No. Then they are merely moulding some environment created by someone else... </rant>

It was definitely interesting to see how a broader audience like HN reacts to the ideas today. 😅 Some people there are very comfortable with the current world of computing and don't see a need for change, so they indeed seemed to miss the point, but that's probably okay. To be honest, it's very early days for these malleability ideas, so it seems natural. I am sure many people (esp. on HN) might not be interested when there's no startup to back or quick solution to try out today, and that's okay. For now, I'm mainly hoping to reach anyone interested in experimenting with these ideas or wanting to learn more about those who are doing so. At the same time, there was some good discussion of finer details in a few of the sub-threads, and I hope it has at least planted a seed for people to think about the ideas over time. Even if people disagree or don't see the point in it today, hopefully they are at least now aware that some people do, and may be more open to such ideas down the road. Since the HN post appeared, a lot of new people have gotten in touch to share their excitement for these ideas, so overall I'd say the HN post was a positive step even if there are many confused people in the comments. Thanks to everyone here who may have waded in the HN comments with their own perspective. 😄

Oh I'm very interested in the topic. This is why I have strong feelings about it.

@Kartik Agaram Ah great, I wasn't sure how to interpret your statement above "I found the HN thread more useful than the post it was commenting on"... I assume it means you don't find the https://malleable.systems/ site useful, but you are interested in the topic, so I am curious if you see room for improvement or if you feel a completely different approach is needed. Thanks for your earlier suggestion to add info on trade-offs. 🙂

Yeah, sorry about that 😬 [1]. I was referring purely to the narrow subjective feeling I got while reading the prose on both pages. The domain name and the headline resonates strongly. When your previous thread rolled by I spent a lot of time trying to pin down what bothered me about it, and to come up with some constructive feedback. I couldn't think of any, so I chose to err on the side of saying nothing. This time around I'm still unable to be as constructive as I would like, sorry about that. I'm still thinking about this, because it matters a lot to me. I want this page to be superior to drive-by comments by people on the internet. [1] I come from a culture where feedback is often incredibly subtle, and given with lots of circumlocution. In spite of that I'm a pretty unsubtle guy. The result: many times in my life I've failed to heed warnings that (to others) seemed really repeated and increasingly unsubtle. This still happens, even after I moved to the West. As a result, I sometimes accidentally come across as overly harsh without intending to, the way someone may speak overly loudly if they can't hear themselves. At other times, I consciously err on the side of harshing, just to make a contrast really obvious and make sure that others don't end up in the failure modes I've found myself in.

@Kartik Agaram Thanks for the detailed reply! That helps me understand your perspective. If you happen to think of changes down the line or would like to contribute a post on the site, feel free to react out. 🙂 It might be interesting for someone (other than me) to write an “anti-post” on the blog synthesising all the ways it will “definitely never” work... 🤔 It would be good to have another voice in the spectrum of perspectives represented. I think such a post would just inspire me further to prove it can be done. 😅

I don't feel that it will definitely never work. I think it has to work, because the alternatives all suck. What I share in common with your hypothetical interlocutors is the unspoken question, "how could this possibly be made to work?" In https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5T9GPWFL/p1586869277389100?thread_ts=1584718837.435500&amp;cid=C5T9GPWFL you suggested that you're trying to separate goals from solutions and focus on the former. That's reasonable as a goal for this particular page. (It's also why I find this page unsatisfying.) But it also seems reasonable for it to trigger conversations about the how. That doesn't feel like "missing the point". Isn't that sort of conversation what this page is designed to engender? Perhaps it will help to triangulate by bringing up my mission: http://akkartik.name/about. Not to brag, but we're attacking highly overlapping if not isomorphic problems. By definition I should have addressed any shortcomings I bring up here. It stays high-level, focuses on goals, but also indicates the sorts of trade-offs I'm willing to make. I'd love to receive similar criticism from you about what it's lacking. I should probably update it after my recent efforts writing my paper 😅 It's quite possible there's a cultural chasm here from me spending too much time on HN. I'd love to understand it better. Perhaps it would help to drill down into which comments you consider to be missing the point. It might require a private conversation, but it might help make this conversation more concrete. Here, I'll start by summarizing how I view the top-level comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22858254: neutral sentiment, acknowledges you're stating an unpopular opinion, responds with another. Seems useful for generating ideas, and -- reading between the lines -- sympathetic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859409: negative sentiment. I would steelman it ("what could this be true of?") as asking a) do you propose limits to extensibility, and b) how do you imagine the system as a whole self-regulating in response to bad changes? That seems useful, even if it's not phrased constructively. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22862292: not useful, as @Chris Knott already pointed out. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859613: positive sentiment. Points out the future is already here, maybe just not evenly distributed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22874983: negative sentiment, but suggests that your problem statement needs focus. Seems like useful feedback. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22858315: neutral sentiment, draws a connection with another story on the frontpage to highlight a trade-off. Super useful, to my mind. Engendered a response (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22858888) from someone seemingly ripe to join the movement. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22858897: neutral sentiment, brings up Plan 9 as prior art. My favorite sub-thread, if my actions are any guide. (Plan 9 isn't a major obsession of mine.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22864602: negative sentiment, airs a conservation of complexity argument that might be worth addressing head-on. Maybe you need a FAQ? Other people making positive noises in startlingly diverse choices of words: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22862660 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859957 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22862143 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22872606 (supporting the right to make a mess) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859278: Someone being politely skeptical by using Rails as an example. So they're missing the point a bit, thinking about how opinionated you should be after you have achieved malleability. Still kinda interesting to me. This is just the top-level comments, but at a glance the responses in the major sub-trees seem to mostly be ping-pong rebuttals. So to first approximation half the comments are supportive of the endeavor! Overall, there's a refreshing lack of "startup mindset" in this thread, particularly if -- like me -- you go in expecting 90% of everything to be crap. Nobody's asking you how you make money, or to to define a market, or to tweak the website. Great example of my thesis that HN is really 2 or 3 mostly-decoupled communities.

HN is easy and fashionable to diss, but I found this thread useful. Yes you have to filter, and yes you need some flame-retardant underwear at times, but if you're willing to sift through you get some gems.

Just wanted to say I generally agree with this, which is why I go to HN 😄. I guess I was just expecting to see a higher 'hit rate' with this post.

Thanks for the pointer (I don't follow HN much these days). It's a pity that most comments focus on comparing Emacs to other text editors with little reference to malleability!

@J. Ryan Stinnett: "anti-post" - You mean like BV's "Future of programming"?

@Dan Cook Ah, that video's more like history plus an alternative universe, but that would also be interesting, yes! 😄 For "anti-post", I was thinking something like "malleability will never work because X, Y, Z, ..." (hopefully as something longer form like a blog post where there's more to think about than your typical HN comment).

Ah, I totally didn't think of the difference between a personal and collective mission statement. It makes a lot more sense now. Thanks!