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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I feel this the most on mobile platforms where the phone really should be acting as your agent but instead we're stuck with all these apps.

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There's an additional factor on the phone and increasingly the computer: mutual distrust.

All the apps are carefully sandboxed, because left unattended they will steal your data. The new category of AI largely works by sending your data to a server in the US where it can be surveilled. It would be great to have interoperability but first the user has to have confidence that it's not going to be weaponized against them.

The "in a box" phenomenon is very tangible to me when I am using the iOS Shortcuts feature. Its capabilities are so powerful, but its utility will always have a ceiling because app publishers' interests are generally not aligned with exposing a Shortcuts API to users. The more easily a user can automate and script the tasks that they use your app for, the less engagement their metrics will show.

It is worse on phones, but most desktop computing feels like this too, at least when you're not at a command line. I've been trying to puzzle out what I'd like computing to look like instead, but I don't get far beyond a concept of "objects" and "actions" as fundamental building blocks. How to actually expose this... yeah, it's tough.

COM, buddy! Publish your interface with a known UUID, anyone can claim support for your interface in the system registry, there's a standard way to initialize libraries and pull objects supporting the interface out of it, so now you can pull other peoples' applications into yours, without knowing anything about their software. This is used _all over the place_ on Windows, for things like arbitrary cross-application embedding and context menu support... at least before we realized we miiiight want to have some notion of "computer security".

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/com/com-tech...

have you seen https://pharo.org/ by chance? it's a smalltalk IDE built in smalltalk, which means that the whole thing is editable at runtime. it's hard to describe before you see it, https://pharo.org/features has some demos.

I tried pharo, its an interesting thing but I don't see it as a particularly practical solution.

Yes its editable in runtime, but not the whole thing and not reliably so: I remember changing some low level array methods that broke the whole image.

Even in pharo your data has to be organised in some way and if you add new code to existing image you have to know how to reach the data you need.

And the biggest downside to productivity and stability is it doesn't have a type system and every action can fail because the receiver doesn't support a particular message.

Doesn't editing "the whole thing" include edits that break stuff?

> data has to be organised in some way

Yes it does.

Smalltalk implementations usually do support live coding "allowing developers to modify and experiment with code while the program is running".

https://www.cincom.com/blog/smalltalk/smalltalk-programming-...

There's a tension between the bash economy which is too simple but pleasantly terse and the powershell economy which has a richer data structure but feels painfully verbose.

interesting. how would you make it better?

Clear APIs and better semantics. Another post points out how gross mistrust gets in the way but there are alao little mistrusts. For instance if there was an API to compare restaurant menus and order things through an agent that moves power up to the agent who can influence who gets the business.

That is, I'm not afraid of being branded subversive because I like to eat strange foreign foods, I'm afraid that I'm going to get the worst pizza in town instead of the best pizza in town because somebody paid off Apple or because Google or Facebook can put up a tollbooth in front of new entrants or that they might not be interested in working with or being fair with independent restaurants because private equity has bought most of them up.

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