Ink and Switch wrote a nice blogpost recently talking about "Malleable Software" https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/malleable-software/

cwebber@social.coop

It resonated with me a lot. The idea of building software that has an on-ramp that keeps on-ramping, guiding a user to not only become an expert, but to make the software their own, really resonated with me.

It's felt for a long time that Gnome has gone in the opposite direction. Trying to make something easy and clean, but end users aren't part of that journey.

cwebber@social.coop

I don't just want to focus on the negative: if not Gnome, what *should* we use? Well, I'm not sure anything else is currently ideal. Maybe it's time for something else.

I particularly like the bit about the above essay that talks about how Hypercard helped its users grow to become experts. Topical, and thoughtful.

This is the kind of direction I want to see from software, one where users are part of the story: software that grows with users, users that grow with software.

valhalla@social.gl-como.it

@cwebber sugar (from the OLPC project) was quite nice, and it's a bit more recent than hypercard, but I'm afraid it's also dead, right?

(also quite targeted towards children rather than general users)