Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

lepiter.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 73 posts

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#51

Post by tudorgirba »

FFP999 wrote: post #18
pavlov wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would you improve on this first paragraph?

"Glamorous Toolkit (GT) is the Moldable Development Environment. Version 1.0 embodies more than 6 years of development and is the result of some 14 years of research. Our goal is to make systems explainable by means of custom tools created for each problem. Glamorous Toolkit makes this possible by making the creation of custom tools inexpensive and seamless."

It introduces a new concept: Moldable Development. And it summarizes succinctly what it's about: creating custom tools for each development problem. Both of these are being exemplified in the article.

What else would have felt better for you?

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#52

Post by tudorgirba »

user3939382 wrote: post #23

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.

Hmm, it should work just by downloading the ready made distribution in most systems without any other prerequisites. Would you like to detail what you tried? And what do you mean by 404?

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#53

Post by celeritascelery »

tudorgirba wrote: post #49
celeritascelery wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The article was not meant to describe everything in GT. There is a whole book delivered in the environment to cover this. You can also see it here: book.gtoolkit.com. In the second half of the article it says that those are just examples of what is possible, but the really interesting bit is that we build these tools for every single development problem, including when we deal with external systems or languages. And…

I wasn’t expecting it to describe everything in GT. But I was hoping it would describe something about how these rust wrappers are implemented (or at least link to some code or docs). Being able to inspect your compiled machine code at a high level is really unique property I haven’t seen before and want to learn more about. I didn’t see anything about it in the book either.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#55

Post by [deleted] »

nylonstrung wrote: post #37
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…

Glamorous seems like something no one asked for- aggregating a bunch of semi-related tools into a jack-of-all trades platform. I don't understand who it is for Datasette is awesome btw

[deleted]

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#56

Post by oddthink »

This may be too late to this thread to matter, but I've been dabbling with GT for a few months, and I like it so far.

I'm using a few of the modalities mentioned in the article.

I use it as for "Pharo development" / Smalltalk IDE. I've tried a few times to learn Pharo and Smalltalk, but I've stuck with GT more than I ever had with raw Pharo. It feels nicer graphically, and, most importantly, it lets me write notes about what I'm doing and exploring and save them as part of the image. That means I can open GT and continue right from where I left off, even if it's been a month since I looked.

I use it for "Personal knowledge management", mostly. Little projects and analyses that occur to me. Nothing fancy, things like writing up why it's easier to get heads-tails in a sequence of coin flips than heads-heads, with a bit of simulation, a writeup of the Markov chain, derivation of expected times, etc. I've done that many times before, but it feels good to have it all together in an aesthetically-pleasing form. Bits on game odds, leetcode-ish algorithms exploration, general computational fiddling.

Once I figured it out, I like the git integration for both code and notebook pages. That goes a long way to reassuring me that the things I do won't be lost. I still don't quite get the Metacello / BaselineOfX dependency management, but I'll get there.

I did a little API browsing, mostly following the "Exploring the GitHub REST API in 7'" video by Oscar Nierstrasz (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vFwfwy5WZA). That series is excellent and I think does a good job of illustrating the power of the system and how it's different.

But, in general, it feels like a good "tool for thought".

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#57

Post by sebastianconcpt »

tudorgirba wrote: post #49
celeritascelery wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The article was not meant to describe everything in GT. There is a whole book delivered in the environment to cover this. You can also see it here: book.gtoolkit.com. In the second half of the article it says that those are just examples of what is possible, but the really interesting bit is that we build these tools for every single development problem, including when we deal with external systems or languages. And…

Can you please share a link to where to get that book? Thanks!

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#58

Post by sebastianconcpt »

lukego wrote: post #42
GeneralMaximus wrote: post #40

The idea makes sense to me. It's basically Emacs, but using Smalltalk instead of Lisp. Instead of using plain text to create your user interface, you have access to a built-in UI toolkit. That's very neat! What's more interesting to me is the fact that the Glamorous Toolkit UI looks perfectly crisp on my M1 MacBook screen, whereas the Pharo IDE is a blurry mess because it doesn't support "retina" screens. If GT is bu…

GToolkit uses a completely parallel graphics stack to standard Pharo. The VM and library ecosystem are still there but the UI is rebuilt from scratch on a modern vector based toolkit. The productivity of the GToolkit developers is impressive.

   The productivity of the GToolkit developers is impressive.
Is it demoed in some video?

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#59

Post by celeritascelery »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #57
tudorgirba wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article was not meant to describe everything in GT. There is a whole book delivered in the environment to cover this. You can also see it here: book.gtoolkit.com. In the second half of the article it says that those are just examples of what is possible, but the really interesting bit is that we build these tools for every single development problem, including when we deal with external systems or languages. And…

Can you please share a link to where to get that book? Thanks!

book.gtoolkit.com is the URL
Post reply on HN