22 January 03 - 19:56Tinkerable Software

Tinkerable Software

In Brian Marick's dreams - as opposed to the nightmare which his piece narrates - every software application comes with a little scripting language built in. You could rearrange the non-architectural bits of such apps more or less as easily as you can move furniture around in a house, or drill holes into walls and so on.

Part of me wants to approve; I've always loved, for instance, text editors of the emacs or SlickEdit variety. With these tools, you can whip up a one-off text manipulation routine just for this special case that would take days or weeks to process by hand. (There's a limit to what you can do even with regular expressions.)

Another part whispers that outside of text processors, and even there, end-user programming has never seemed to have that much appeal or applicability; and this is after all what "tinkerability" seems to amount to.

A third part wonders about possible parallels between testability and tinkerability.

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