Glamorous Toolkit: Moldable development environment

Very interesting question, and one that we are struggling to address :).

It's those and more. It's also a programmable knowledge management system. It comes with playground snippets and debuggers for several languages, like JS and Python. More recently it is also a distributed Smalltalk that can be debugged remotely. It comes with a graphical stack that unifies editors with visualizations. All these in a single uniform (and not too large) environment that shows that programming, knowledge management, API management and data science can all be served in a single uniform environment.

These are just the large pieces. Yet the goal is to empower people to create their custom system-specific experiences. Actually, we go as far as to create object-specific experiences. The goal is to help people make the inside of their systems explainable through the practice of Moldable Development.

People are using it for various systems and for a variety of use cases that go well beyond programming with Pharo.

For example, there are connections to JS and Python out of the box for executing, inspecting and debugging. These are mere examples of what one can build with the environment.

In any case, the first target of our work is to help people discover and practice Moldable Development which is a generic approach to software engineering.

It's such a challenging problem developing the elevator pitch.

For what it's worth (which is likely very little) the main takeaway I get from the above (in true HN style, without having read the article) is the call-out to knowledge management.

Perhaps because the other bits sound like cool tech you must have built in order to pursue other goals. Who wouldn't want a distributed engine you can debug remotely! I suppose I have some sales hat on. Who could I sell what to?

I'd love to give it a try. However, Pharo still doesn't run out of the box on my Fedora system. It used to work, up to Pharo ~5-6, then stopped working altogether. There's little documentation around installation and even less info on troubleshooting. I'd love to like Pharo, but it simply doesn't work, and nobody cares :( From my memories of it, even when it was still starting properly, it worked... Well, some of the time. Resizing the default font killed the looks of all UI elements, for example.

It's all fixable with enough time and effort, no doubt. Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of time on my hands anymore. I'd love to see and use all the new shiny tools developed in and for Pharo, but - even if it started working again - I don't have the time to read all the code and piece the puzzle together on my own. Some kind of documentation would be nice. Hopefully, included in the distribution. No such luck as far as I can see.

So, even knowing that I'm missing out on some really cool things, I recently switched my Smalltalk development to Cincom® VisualWorks© Smalltalk (I hope I got these Rs and Cs right...) It's a version from 6 years ago at this point and partially closed-source, but it's rock-solid and stable, very well documented with thousands of up to date (easier to provide when you're working with a stable system) pages in PDFs, with guides and references; comes with a lot of goodies and working, well tested support for namespaces, inner classes, visibility modifiers for classes, extended streams (though they're closer to RxJava than classic streams, and I didn't like them very much), some other language extensions (no traits though), the GUI painter, and so on. And all of that works, even if some of it looks less glamorous then the screenshots presented here, which are all I'll ever see of this toolkit until Pharo starts treating users with a bit of basic respect.

I have a blog post about making VW IDE a bit prettier - just look at the screenshots: https://klibert.pl/posts/smalltalk-ide-quickfix.html - yeah, it looks so last-gen, right? I know. But it works. And it survived like 3 system upgrades, 1 reinstall and 1 fresh install on a new laptop without issues. If only Cincom was more flexible when it comes to licensing the commercial version!

I struggled initially to understand what this was about. Then, after digging a little bit more, I see that it is an open and rich environment to visualize (while executing) data from different perspectives while being extensible from within the same environment (using Pharo), allowing to create a rich and custom ecosystem for data and systems exploration in an orderly and structured manner.

What I couldn't find is information about workshops or forums besides discord to talk and understand about its possibilities.

Specifically, I had trouble understanding how to apply it to other programming languages and their frameworks. I can see that for some of them (e.g. PHP) you have to export the project with a tool and then import it into GToolkit, but that converts such a system into just an static structure to be analyzed, but not a live system to experiment with. This would mean that live documentation would require permanently exporting and then importing the code from such system. To get a living system + its real time perspectives and embedded live documentation it seems you must program the system in Pharo.