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What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

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Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#11

Post by tdrgabi »

stonogo wrote: post #3

Having looked at the screenshots and read the text, I still have no idea what Glamorous Toolkit v1.0 is. If I had to guess, I'd say it's another attempt at 'notebook' style computing interfaces, but I suppose there's a reason the author is too coy to say that, so I am forced to conclude that I just don't know what it is, and the creator is unable or unwilling to tell me.

I had the same problem as you.

My current understanding is that it's similar to Emacs, but in this case it uses Smalltalk instead of Elisp.

It's an IDE who's selling point is that you should extend while coding.

If my day job uses Python, for example, is it pragmatic to use Glamorous Toolkit? Yes, it has a few functions for editing code in some language .. but you get a lot more Python power from Intellij or Pycharm. I don't use Smalltalk but if I were, I would consider it, alongside Pharo or instead of Pharo.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#12

Post by FFP999 »

lukego wrote: post #9
stonogo wrote: post #3

Having looked at the screenshots and read the text, I still have no idea what Glamorous Toolkit v1.0 is. If I had to guess, I'd say it's another attempt at 'notebook' style computing interfaces, but I suppose there's a reason the author is too coy to say that, so I am forced to conclude that I just don't know what it is, and the creator is unable or unwilling to tell me.

It's well worth taking for a spin.

Can you only use it for Smalltalk code though?

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#14

Post by smokel »

stonogo wrote: post #3

Having looked at the screenshots and read the text, I still have no idea what Glamorous Toolkit v1.0 is. If I had to guess, I'd say it's another attempt at 'notebook' style computing interfaces, but I suppose there's a reason the author is too coy to say that, so I am forced to conclude that I just don't know what it is, and the creator is unable or unwilling to tell me.

This paragraph seems pretty clear to me:

"Glamorous Toolkit is the Moldable Development Environment. Moldable Development is a new perspective on programming through which we create custom tools for every development problem. We find that this ability changes the very nature of programming."

It's an IDE that lets you easily create tools for experimenting with your code.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#15

Post by pavlov »

FFP999 wrote: post #8
mattlondon wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. The style of writing is also quite annoying to follow as well, which doesn't help. Looks to me like basically a Jupyter notebook, but going horizontal instead of vertical. I don't need that for reading API docs, thanks.

Is it just me or does it come off as super condescending? I feel that, if you can't explain to us concisely what the thing you've been working on for decades is about, that's a huge red flag. The most I can tell you after reading this page: it has something to do with software development, and my inclination to explore further is zero.

Sometimes it’s just hard to explain something concisely when it’s both rapidly evolving and different from people’s assumptions.

In 1992 it was quite hard to explain what the Internet is. Is it a protocol? Yes, a whole bunch of them actually. Is it yet another email system? Yes, among other things. Is it like a forum? Yes, there’s Usenet, but you can also use that from BBS’s that are not really part of “the Internet”. So do you dial in like on Compuserve? Yes, that’s one way. Does it have games? Yes, but very different ones (tries to explain MUDs).

At that point many a reasonable person has given up with the understanding that it’s some kind of networky thing with a bunch of geeky apps, and you need to be a full-time student to figure it out.

In retrospect it’s easy to think that obviously something like the WWW would come along and clear all this up. I don’t think it was obvious at all in that moment, especially when all the consumer traction was with products like Windows and the VC money was flowing into flashy digital entertainment stuff like CD-ROMs and cable TV walled gardens that were the opposite of the Internet.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#16

Post by PuercoPop »

FFP999 wrote: post #12
lukego wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's well worth taking for a spin.

Can you only use it for Smalltalk code though?

No, the included demos have examples for a analyzing Ruby (ActiveRecord) and Java. There was a paper a while back about moldable development where they showed a Python debugger.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#17

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

tdrgabi wrote: post #11
stonogo wrote: post #3

Having looked at the screenshots and read the text, I still have no idea what Glamorous Toolkit v1.0 is. If I had to guess, I'd say it's another attempt at 'notebook' style computing interfaces, but I suppose there's a reason the author is too coy to say that, so I am forced to conclude that I just don't know what it is, and the creator is unable or unwilling to tell me.

I had the same problem as you. My current understanding is that it's similar to Emacs, but in this case it uses Smalltalk instead of Elisp. It's an IDE who's selling point is that you should extend while coding. If my day job uses Python, for example, is it pragmatic to use Glamorous Toolkit? Yes, it has a few functions for editing code in some language .. but you get a lot more Python power from Intellij or Pycharm.…

If my day job used Rust, I’d be very interested in trying this. Live development with your code loaded gives you a lot of power that you don’t know you’re missing until you try it with a Common Lisp, Clojure or Smalltalk environment.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#18

Post by FFP999 »

pavlov wrote: post #15
FFP999 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just me or does it come off as super condescending? I feel that, if you can't explain to us concisely what the thing you've been working on for decades is about, that's a huge red flag. The most I can tell you after reading this page: it has something to do with software development, and my inclination to explore further is zero.

Sometimes it’s just hard to explain something concisely when it’s both rapidly evolving and different from people’s assumptions. In 1992 it was quite hard to explain what the Internet is. Is it a protocol? Yes, a whole bunch of them actually. Is it yet another email system? Yes, among other things. Is it like a forum? Yes, there’s Usenet, but you can also use that from BBS’s that are not really part of “the Internet”…

Perhaps, and yet, I feel like this page still does a particularly bad job of explaining what this thing is. Especially to an audience full of hardcore nerds.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#19

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

lukego wrote: post #13
FFP999 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you only use it for Smalltalk code though?

The best I can say is that's analogous to asking if you can only use Emacs for Emacs Lisp code.

Yeah, I’m going to be giving this a spin pretty school to see how working on Ruby is like in it. It also gave me the idea of building a Swank client in smalltalk and maybe a McClim backend, but it’d be hard for me to give up emacs at this point.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#20

Post by dustingetz »

simonw wrote: post #10

OK, having watched the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqogvp1dGpk (8 minutes, so 4 minutes if you 2x it) I understand why they have such a hard time answering the question "What is Glamorous Toolkit?" It's effectively a combination of a Smalltalk IDE, a Jupyter/Observable-style notebook environment and a tool somewhat like R Studio. It's a hard thing to categorize, because it's not exactly the same kind of…

solution formula: talk to your users, write down the words they use, explain it back to them using their own words
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