Malleable computing, Emacs, and you | Hacker News Reader

Malleable computing, Emacs, and you

yummymelon.com

159 pointskickingvegas55 comments

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.

This sounds so cool! Do you have this shared somewhere?

https://pricklypear.rocks/

Thank you for checking it out! Fair warning, it's vibeslop and I really don't have a clue what I'm doing. I have very little background in compilers or FP or really anything. I'm honestly just shocked at how well it works.

If you want to kick the tires on it or even if you just find it interesting, please feel free to reach out! I'm kind of obsessed with this thing now, and would love and appreciate any feedback

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

I love the look of the status output.

Thanks! It is mathematically rigorous https://replicated.live/blog/status

> 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?

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

https://github.com/magit/forge

OP here. Happy to answer any questions about my post in this thread.

Great article, TIL vtable.

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

Seeing how much functionality I could get from just 400 LoC was one of the motivations for writing this post.

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?

Short answer, yes I am a Mac guy. AFAIK, both AppleScript and Shortcuts/Intents are mechanisms Apple has provided to support orchestration between apps. I do not consider them “malleable computing” mechanisms as they do not allow for adapting and reshaping the apps themselves. That said, AppleScript and Shortcuts are only as useful as the support given to them by 3rd party apps, which IMHO has always been mid.

If you're into malleable computing you'd never have been a "Mac person"

Yeah, NeXTSTEP is notoriously a locked-down, untweakable OS. It's not like anyone was able to use it to program anything of consequence.

I had an argument with Steve Jobs about pie menus at the Educom conference in Washington DC, October 26 1988 -- right after he finally shipped NeXTSTEP (people had been teasing it as vaporware with "NeVRSTEP" t-shirts).

I was demonstrating the work I'd done at the UMD Human Computer Interaction Lab on a color Sun 3/60 that Sun lent me to use at their booth, which happened to be right across from the NeXT booth.

Ben Shneiderman dragged Steve Jobs over to the Sun booth, and I gave him a NeWS demo for about half an hour: HyperTIES, UniPress Emacs, pie menus, PostScript windows in arbitrary shapes — the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit, Bill Joy's head popping up when you pointed at it, that kind of thing. Jobs has RELIGION about UI, and he argued wonderfully. He also has volume. On the show floor, in a suit and tie, he was jumping up and down yelling:

"That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that's neat! That sucks!"

Not discouraged, I figured one neat to three sucks was a good score from Steve Jobs. When I explained how flexible NeWS was -- programmable PostScript in the window system, malleable windows, extensible UI, transforming all menus of all apps into pie menus, etc -- he told me:

"I don't need flexibility -- I got my window system right the first time!"

Okay, agree to disagree. Then I gave him a free NeWS "NeRD" button, which he gracefully accepted, then he departed leaving my reality intact and undistorted.

So empthought's joke isn't far from the design philosophy. NeXT was world-class software, but malleability for the user was exactly what Jobs was proud of not offering. That's a big part of why the Emacs / NeWS / PostScript / Smalltalk / Self / Oberon / JavaScript / AJAX branch of computing and the Mac / NeXT / Display PostScript / Objective C / Cocoa branch diverged.

More context from that week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098824

Also, during the conference I was giving essentially the same rolling demos to anyone who walked by, and some scruffy looking dude was hanging out and watched the whole series until it looped back to Emacs, then he finally remarked "I used to use EMACS on ITS." (i.e. the original TECO version)

...I said "Wow, what was your user name? Mine was A2DEH@AI!" and he replied "WNJ".

Only then did I realize I had been giving demos to Bill Joy, the author of VI, of UniPress Emacs for NeWS, and of HyperTIES embedded graphical pop-up links demo with his own inflatable pop-up head. I didn't recognize him because he'd shaved his beard!

HyperTIES founders storyboard: https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/emacs/founders.st0

Bill Joy's Head Target: https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/emacs/obj/founder.curly.tn0

NeWS PostScript pop-up target class: https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/target.ps

At least it wasn't RMS, who would have immediately objected strongly to the "Evil Software Hoarder" version of Emacs I was using.

Here are some examples of not-locked-down NeWS user interfaces:

HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Browsing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM

HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU

Just the Pie Menus from All the Widgets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOLS9I_tdKE

Ben Shneiderman, Don Hopkins, and pie menus in Spring 1989 on a Sun Workstation, running NeWS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg

Nelson Spins Pip While Emacs Watches:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRaD5zH3Qdg

(Oops that was a different Emacs, my cat.)

Thanks for sharing this! You are a legend!

How was OSA/AppleScript not an OS-level malleable computing layer?

I don't know first hand of anyone who ever used it for anything. Maybe I knew the wrong Mac users (mostly teachers).

Re CharlesW: OSA was an OS-level malleable-computing layer, on paper. Apple Events exposed scriptable objects; OSA let multiple scripting dialects share the same runtime. The gap was who actually shipped working product.

Dave Winer's Frontier (UserTalk) is the piece these threads usually skip. Frontier 1.0 shipped in January 1992 -- the same month Apple finally held its one-day scripting developer conference, after years of canceling and restarting AppleScript.

Winer's history:

http://scripting.com/dwiner/historyOfFrontier.html

UserTalk wasn't bolted on. It was registered as an OSA dialect: Script Editor, HyperCard, Nisus ("Do Script"), and other OSA hosts could run UserTalk, not only Frontier.

Manual:

http://scripting.com/frontier/manual/chapter01.html

UserTalk as OSA dialect:

https://sbc.apeth.com/frontierDef/ch34.html

What made it malleable in practice: syntax is an outline (code and data are the same tree); object DB + interpreter + outliner in one app; and one of the most complete Apple Events client/server stacks on the Mac -- I used Frontier and Radio Userland to automate other apps heavily, often before their AppleScript dictionaries caught up.

So yes: OSA/AppleScript was malleable computing at the OS layer if you count UserTalk and HyperCard and scriptable apps, not only Apple's English-like syntax. AppleScript won the namespace; that doesn't mean nobody used the layer. SoftTalker's teachers weren't the crowd wiring Finder, FileMaker, HyperCard, and CGI with UserTalk.

Later the same core powered Manila, Radio Userland, RSS, OPML, XML-RPC. Short timeline:

https://eclecticlight.co/2025/02/22/a-brief-history-of-scrip...

I've posted about this at length before on HN — ThinkTank, MORE, UserTalk, Apple Events, Radio Userland, the whole outline-as-language lineage. Two long ones:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30871497

(on Excel / visual data models — why we still need "Google Trees", and how Frontier got there from MORE)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217472

(on Xanadu open source, Hugh Daniel in the winged cap, and why hypertext without a scripting language is hyper-crap)

Index post linking several of these threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21170434

Excerpts from the first (30871497):

The thing that's missing from "Google Docs" is a decent collaborative outliner called "Google Trees", that does to "NLS" and "Frontier" what "Google Sheets" did to "VisiCalc" and "Excel".

And I don't mean "Google Wave", I mean a truly collaborative extensible visually programmable spreadsheet-like outliner with expressions, constraints, absolute and relative xpath-like addressing, and scripting like Google Sheets, but with a tree instead of a grid. That eats drinks scripts and shits JSON and XML or any other structured data.

Dave Winer ... originally developed a wonderful outliner on the Mac originally called "ThinkTank" and then "MORE", which later evolved into the "Frontier" programming language, and ultimately the "Radio Free Userland" desktop blogging and RSS syndication tool.

More was great because it had a well designed user interface and feature set with fluid "fahrvergnügen" that made it really easy to use with the keyboard as well as the mouse.

After the success of MORE, he went on to develop a scripting language whose syntax (for both code and data) was an outline. Kind of like Lisp with open/close triangles instead of parens! It had one of the most comprehensive implementation of Apple Events client and server support of any Mac application, and was really useful for automating other Mac apps, earlier and in many ways better than AppleScript.

Then XML came along, and he integrated support for XML into the outliner and programming language, and used Frontier to build "Aretha", "Manila", and "Radio Userland".

He used Frontier to build a fully programmable blogging and podcasting platform, with a dynamic HTTP server, a static HTML generator, structured XML editing, RSS publication and syndication, XML-RPC client and server, OPML import and export, and much more.

Excerpts from the second (26217472):

I was a "random turist" high school kid visiting the AI lab on a pilgrimage. That was when I first met Hugh Daniel: this energetic excited big hairy hippie guy in a Xanadu baseball cap with wings, who I worked with later, hacking NeWS. Hugh and I worked together for two different companies porting NeWS to the Mac.

The fact that Xanadu didn't have a built-in extension language was a disappointment, since extensibility was an essential ingredient to the success of Emacs, HyperCard, Director, and the World Wide Web.

Anyway, my take on all this hyper-crap is that it's useless without a good scripting language. I think that's why Emacs was so successful, why HyperCard was so important, what made NeWS so interesting, why HyperLook was so powerful, why Director has been so successful, how it's possible for you to read this discussion board served by Frontier, and what made the World Wide Web what it is today: they all had extension languages built into them.

If you're into malleable computing and you've never looked at outline-as-language systems (Frontier/UserTalk, MORE, later outliner-programming ideas), you're missing half the Mac story — the half that shipped before AppleScript stabilized.

Always a pleasure to sit down for Mr Hopkins' story time. Many gems of ideas and memories.

For others like me who hadn't heard the word "fahrvergnügen", it translates to "pleasure of driving". From German fahren ("to drive") + Vergnügen ("pleasure/enjoyment"). The term was popular in advertisements for Volkswagen vehicles, which seem to have certain affinity to Apple products (past and now, good and bad sides).

Dave Winer's personal site is still up and running on UserLand Frontier! http://davewiner.userland.com/default

> ..how I got involved in outlining while I was learning about programming on my way to doing an BBS which turned out to be an outliner which turned out to be part of a scripting system.

> the idea came from LISP programming systems that had hierarchic program editors. I wanted to see if the same thing could be done for Pascal. The result was a development system that ran on PDP-11s under Unix that viewed and edited source code as a tree. This embryonic outliner could dive and surface, displaying one level of the hierarchy at a time. Programmers could edit the structure of their programs directly.

Fascinating stuff, this is like a structural/projectional editor for oulines and documents, extensible with scripting. Well, I have a dozen tabs open now, I'll enjoy reading through them. The Frontier manual with little screenshots of classic Macintosh interface is sweet, nostalgic and inspires me to imagine what a new take on the idea might look like, with modern web tech and benefit of hindsight.

Did you look into the existing org-sync package? I know the use case is slightly different but I think it still works.

Wasn't aware of org-sync until now. That said for my use case I still would not use it as I didn't want to setup another GH authentication token for another client. YMMV.

Definitely understandable, the proliferation of api creds and ways of passing them in is a major pain point.

Could you elaborate on BIBO? The wiki article is a bit above my pay grade

Sure. My reference to BIBO borrows the idea from control theory that if you put bounds on your input, your output will likewise be bounded given your system is BIBO-stable. Applying this to software, if you constrain the range of input to values that will be correctly processed, then you could exploit this to write less code (example: relax building type-checking and error handling code if you know the input is going to be an integer). I’ll caveat that this is not guidance, but more observation, particularly for the case where the audience is one as opposed to many.

This makes total sense, thank you. I come from a Python background and appreciate a similar philosophy in Ruby, which is that sometimes it's just nicer and easier to not do typing. It's okay to prioritize aesthetics and ease in code.

I've gone much deeper into type checking since then, but I still like simple, dynamic scripting.

I've heard "functional core, imperative edges" and I feel like that kind of applies to static vs dynamic. I think there's a lot of cases where exposing a scripting language is a perfectly sane and good design pattern.

I'm not sure Emacs fits that category, hah, but it's just so dang useful.

I had not heard of control theory, I appreciate this

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.

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.

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

Might be more recognized from the X Window System design principles rather:

> Provide mechanism rather than policy. In particular, place user interface policy in the clients' hands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System_protocols_and_...

It wasn't part of the original Unix philosophy, but I see that went through several revisions.

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.

AutoHotkey adds a malleable computing layer to Windows.

Meh, it's better than nothing. Though not a great interface or DSL.

2.0 fixes a ton of stuff over 1.0, but yeah you're not wrong.

Between custom keybinds, hot strings, and pop-up menus I have literally hundreds of tiny AHK scripts running 24/7. I'm pretty sure there's stuff I've literally forgotten is an AHK vs an actual part of Windows. It's all just ingrained in my muscle memory at this point.

Hammerspoon (Mac) is much better. It's basically Lua, with access to all the MacOS automation APIs.

Hammerspoon is amazing, and LLMs are very good at writing configuration for it. I'm quite happy with my config.

Great 'scratch my own itch' story and I like the framing of Emacs and Elisp as Malleable Software.

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).

I love emacs

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.

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

> how did we go back to dead text files again?

We never went away from it. It's how a significant amount of computer use has always been. Smalltalk, Oberon, Lisp Machines (mentioned by sibling), they were always minority systems.

There was a brief time when maybe home computers could have leaned this way, but that lasted until VisiCalc. What sold computers was software that turned them from clay to be molded by the user into a defined tool. People prefer appliances (or were convinced to prefer appliances), and appliances make more money for businesses than distributing programs as a Smalltalk package would have.

> I genuinely do wonder why that has been the trajectory.

The simple answer here is still likely the best one: Smalltalk and Lisp Machine systems were expensive and proprietary right at the same time that Unix and C became free (and therefore ran everywhere)

Yes, and porting them on top of UNIX wasn't the same thing, while still being commercial.

Even with commercial UNIXes, it was extra on top of standard UNIX developer SKU.

Same with Ada, by the way.

The Smalltalk approach doesn't really integrate well with anything else.

If you treat data and code the same, it's hard to separate code from data. If you're writing a program for a single machine on which it should be used, that's fine, but if you want to write your code once and run it across many machines, that's a problem.

ERP systems are a bit like this; system owners (businesses) are often able to change any part of the system they want. Predictably, this makes version upgrades an incredible pain and often locks companies into an unsupported proprietary fork of a 20-year-old version of their CRM.

There are image distribution ways, and already on the 1990's there was image based SCM products.

Most of those ERP systems are a pain, because all those changes where spread across several contractors, each doing their own little silo while keeping everything else running.

SaaS products are basically the Smalltalk approach, and they aren't going away, in fact they are doubling down with iPaaS and AI agentic tooling.

In such business domains, classical backend coding is almost gone, what is left are serverless, microservices, many of which are slowly being exposed as MCP tools.

> The Smalltalk approach doesn't really integrate well with anything else.

That's not true. GToolkit (built on Pharo Smalltalk) integrates tightly with Git for VCS and Rust via FFI for external libraries. It integrates with external Python and JavaScript through IPC. The same IPC mechanism is used to work around the GIL (the same way Python used to do with the multiprocessing library).

Squeak descendants are also not the only Smalltalks available. Smalltalk/X is polyglot, supports Java and C code inline, and has a native AOT compiler (through C). Smalltalk/X and VisualWorks have built-in version control, namespaces, and packages with visibility modifiers.

TL;DR: a live Smalltalk environment doesn't have to be an isolated island. The most popular open-source Smalltalks come from education and hobbyist coding, so they tend to miss a lot of "programming in the large" conveniences, but that's just a historical accident. There's no technical reason why a Smalltalk that's integrated into a wider ecosystem and suited for large teams couldn't exist.

I follow GToolkit from time to time but each and every time I'm a little disappointed there's no code editor with LSP integration like Emacs has major modes for programming. I (think I) understand where they're coming from that GToolkit should be used to build tools to inspect and analyze your codebase and problem domain but I feel that it's such a heavy investment to make (kinda like Emacs) and I don't receive that last bit of payoff of being able to create in it too.

Please correct me if I'm wrong and things changed in the meantime. I really want GToolkit to be a complete IDE.

Until then I'll wistfully watch from the sidelines, dipping my toe in from time to time.

EDIT: Argh, I misunderstood your point: you'd like to use GT as an IDE for non-Smalltalk code, right? I took "LSP integration" to mean "GT providing LSP server implementation", while you meant "GT implementing an LSP client", I think.

That's not something I ever thought I needed, though there is some support for syntax highlighting for JavaScript and Python, I think. I don't think GT is supposed to be a general-purpose, polyglot IDE: it's a bit more specialized than that, IIUC.

I'm leaving the off-topic rant below; it's a bit too long to just delete :(

> Please correct me if I'm wrong and things changed in the meantime.

Sadly, you're not wrong, and as an Emacs user (since 2012) myself, I share your reservations. The text editing widgets in GToolkit are usable, but nowhere near what you get in Emacs. Multiple cursors, iedit, re-builder/visual-regex, editable occur, AST-based editing (paredit/combobulate) are just some of the features I use regularly in Emacs which are (and will be, for a long time) missing in GT. On the flip side, rich formatting, inline images, and interactive widgets are way easier to implement in GT than in Emacs, and Lepiter is a good alternative to Org.

The conventional answer to that is that you shouldn't need those more advanced editing features when working with Smalltalk: the method bodies should be short, you should be using refactoring commands instead of hand-editing code in many places at once, and you should just auto-format after each edit. Even if it's not technically incorrect, I don't like that answer. Because this is the Smalltalkers' mindset (on average), things like LSP implementation (or other support) for external editors[1] never gained traction.

Without writing an $EDITOR-GT wiring yourself, the best you can currently do is some level of external integration. You can add a context menu option like "Edit in Emacs" in GT that will run emacsclient on a temporary file with the method body dumped. It's obviously underwhelming: you have either a powerful editor (Emacs), or a smart editor (GT), and you have to deal with two completely different UIs. Yes, it's bad. It's still better than trying to use just GT for all editing, though.

I ended up structuring my GT project a bit like a Web app. The sources on disk are a source of truth, and coding agents work with them. I have scripts that load the Git repo into a fresh image and either run the tests, run a one-time eval, or open the GT GUI (equivalent of loading a page and opening DevTools in the browser). In GT, I have an Emacs escape hatch for editing, and I use the Git tool to export any changes back to disk. So far, it works OK, though it's closer to how you work with Common Lisp images than traditional Smalltalk "100% in-image" development. It's not ideal, but it allows me to leverage GT while still integrating other tools into the project.

[1] There were attempts in the past; for Emacs, somebody wrote a frontend to Smalltalks called `shampoo`. It's been 14 years since the last commit.

Yep, I'd like to use GT as an IDE for non-Smalltalk code like I currently use Emacs though the off-topic rant is very welcome too and I thank you for it!

Regarding the point of Lepiter vs Org I gave GT another go after I posted my comment and I realized that with the power of "adornments" (which you've mentioned) and so on Lepiter can be more flexible than Org files in a way (though the HTML export seems to ignore outlines currently). If I understood correctly there's nothing preventing you from mixing blocks of Markdown and Org (if Org was implemented) with other custom made blocks (like a snippet of code, chart or view of a GitHub repo). In that regard Lepiter (and GT by extension) seems immensely powerful even if I can't summon spell-checking willy-nilly like I can in Emacs regardless of org-mode or dart-mode for example.

Also there seem to be official examples which I didn't see last time that hint about the possibility of implementing text editors and potentially code editors with LSP integration.

https://book.gtoolkit.com/controlling-completion-in-a-text-e...

https://book.gtoolkit.com/editing-python-sources-through-the...

> In that regard Lepiter (and GT by extension) seems immensely powerful

Yes - I think this all comes from the insistence on using a single rendering tree for everything displayed on screen. It allows mixing all kinds of UI elements everywhere, including nesting of arbitrary widgets inside a text field (and arbitrary text inside any other widget). It's a genuinely powerful model for UI composition :)

> I can't summon spell-checking willy-nilly like I can in Emacs

Yes, that's why I mentioned "features I use regularly in Emacs which are (and will be, for a long time) missing in GT" - it's not that you can't build them; they just need to be built, and with how few developers work on GT, it'll take ages before GT Coder gets those features.

It doesn't help that GT editors seem a bit less ad hoc scriptable than Emacs. I'm not sure why this seems to be the case for me - I suspect the need to structure everything as classes and methods adds non-trivial cognitive overhead for simple scripting. At least compared to the pretty flat, procedural shape of typical Elisp code. Then again, I did not invest enough time into learning how to customize GT's editors, so it might be a shallow impression that would go away with time.

> Also there seem to be official examples

Oh, nice, thanks, I missed that. I mean, it's obviously possible to implement an LSP client for GT, but I didn't know one existed. I'm especially interested in how that is integrated into Coder, since it should be able to provide a lot of functionality that I'd also want to script in my custom Coder instances.

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.

This is pretty much what COM is under Windows.

In a way this is what Powershell offers in Windows.

On Mac using something like PyObjC, maybe coupled with Xonsh, could do the trick.

Useless without local/remote sync. Also kind of obvious is the preferability of composeable UNIX programs over heavily locked down monoliths, hardly calling for a Fred Brooks style exegesis.

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