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What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

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Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#21
post #15
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”…

the internet had 7M users in 1992

http://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_internetxfcstx2008.htm

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#22
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…

"I emphasize with the challenge: I have a similar problem"

empathize, not emphasize

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#24
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…

> It's a hard thing to categorize, because it's not exactly the same kind of thing as anything else.

It's not too difficult to get close.

"It's the visual equivalent of Unix pipes."

"It's a browser inspector with an infinite/unbounded amount of Miller columns." (NB: the browser here is a Smalltalk browser and not a Web browser.)

Etc.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#25
post #24
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…

> It's a hard thing to categorize, because it's not exactly the same kind of thing as anything else. It's not too difficult to get close. "It's the visual equivalent of Unix pipes." "It's a browser inspector with an infinite/unbounded amount of Miller columns." (NB: the browser here is a Smalltalk browser and not a Web browser.) Etc.

After seeing the video, the closest I can get is: ‘it’s like a Smalltalk equivalent of Emacs org-mode, but even more dynamic’.

Which makes sense as an analogy: org-mode is also famously hard to explain, and adding more dynamism just makes it harder.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#26
post #14
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.

And, IIUC, a debugger that lets you define custom views for interesting data? For example, in the "GtLudoGame" image (the first image in the post), the rightmost picture is some sort of custom debugging view for a game state -- so you can visualize it directly as a board state, instead of as a dict or list or whatever.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#27
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…

"I emphasize with the challenge: I have a similar problem" empathize, not emphasize

Your comment emphasizes that you don't empathize with typos.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#28

I tried for an hour to set this up once. The docs were all over the place, you needed prerequisites that were hard to find and linked to 404s. Mysterious errors. Eventually my curiosity was overcome and I gave up.

On Mac at least, you just have to download the zipped disk image and copy over the contents. I just put it in ~/Applications, and it worked.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#29
post #11
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 fiddled with its python interop a bit. It's OK, but could use some expanding: it runs python code in a single venv that you'd need to populate with the packages you need. I couldn't find any support for switching venvs based on project directories, etc.

I could imagine using GT as a more hackable way to interact with code. You don't get the nice automatic features of a python IDE, but you could define graphical views for your objects, drill-down into sub-objects, and the like. But to do that, you'd also have to know some Smalltalk.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#30

And this Rust object inspecting live is also rather interesting https://lepiter.io/feenk/identifying-an-editor-bug-by-inspec...

I feel like that article skipped over the most interesting part, namely how they they actually implemented the object wrappers.
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