Part 2 of a three-part essay, “The Interfaces With Which We Think” (the third part of which has yet to appear). Argues for the importance of malleable user interfaces: that people should be able to compose and customise their digital tools, not just consume them as fixed products.

A person should be allowed to adapt their interfaces no less than they should be allowed to think.

Bret Victor’s Dynamicland project. I love this and want to build one myself. There is SO MUCH content and so many fascinating ideas here: Dynamicland reimagines computing as a physical, collaborative, malleable, humane medium. The website is itself constructed using Dynamicland and contains a wealth of videos, papers, and other documentation.

Arcan is an alternative approach to display servers and UI, drawing inspiration from object capabilities, Plan 9, malleability and much more. See also the 12 Principles for a Diverging Desktop Future blog post for an overview.

Squeak is a direct descendant of the Smalltalk-80 system. Lots to criticise, lots to be inspired by. One of my favourite operating systems, one of my favourite programming languages! Not that it couldn’t be better, of course…

Discussion of a new refinement of “Naked Objects”, which is an approach to generating user interfaces directly from domain models.

An architectural white paper on secure distributed state synchronisation (including key management), from (inter alia) the author of the Noise Protocol Framework.

A recent stab at “personal cloud” network management.

Our mission is to make sure peer-to-peer, user-controlled, community software can beat Big Tech solutions. That’s why we’re working on platform fundamentals that would open the way for our FOSS stack to match the usability and convenience of proprietary platforms.

Pretends a local machine’s containers are a little LAN, exposing that LAN to a browser (via a custom SOCKS proxy) to form a hyperlinkable namespace:

We have Ptyxis as a container-aware terminal emulator… why isn’t there a container-aware web browser that would just communicate directly with the containers? […] As the title suggests, now there kinda is a container-aware browser.

Arcan is an alternative approach to display servers and UI, drawing inspiration from object capabilities, Plan 9, malleability and much more. This blog post motivates and gives an overview of the project; see also the main project page.

The OOPSLA 1997 paper that introduced Squeak, a Smalltalk implementation “written in itself”:

Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks.

The paper discusses the bootstrapping process, the VM’s object format and garbage collector, the Smalltalk-subset-to-C translation process, the implementations’ approach to the BitBlt graphics primitive, performance, and the fledgling Squeak community. The latter is still going strong thirty-some years later.