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Malleable Computing, Emacs, and You

44 points by kickingvegas

by 4b11b4

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by sroerick

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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.

by gritzko

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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

by cfiggers

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by kickingvegas

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by __d

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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.