https://www.inkandswitch.com/end-user-programming/

The early vision was to democratize software creation. We all felt we had this crazy superpower of being able to build software, which had given us these advantages in our careers. You can have tremendous influence in an organization — even if you’re not in leadership — by building software and deploying it to people. So broadly, we were exploring

... See more

By contrast, consumer software tools that enhance human agency, that serve us when we are most creative and intentional, are often built by hobbyists and used by a handful of nerds. If such a tool ever gets too successful one of the Marl-serving companies, flush with cash from advertising or growth-hungry venture capital, will acquire it and kill i... See more

Instead of being a passive user of pre-built applications, I can start assembling my own personalized way of using my computer.

This brings me to a problem that we've been noodling on for several years, and to my mind, it still a critical open question. So when you're trying to build these end-user extensible, digital document systems, there's a few desiderata that you want: You want to be very fast. You want to be safe, in the sense of, end users aren't going to be injecti... See more

These projects, Victor says, are just “nibbles around the edges” of his larger obsession: how the media in which we choose to represent our ideas shape (and too often, limit) what ideas we can have. “We have these things called computers, and we’re basically just using them as really fast paper emulators,” he says. “With the invention of the printi... See more

Brush up on the prior art:  “We were intellectually excited about going down that path of this general space of software creation. So we spent a lot of time doing research. It was almost like being on a sabbatical, reading all this prior art of old computing pioneers, like  Douglas Engelbart  and  Bill Atkinson , and even conte

... See more