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What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

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Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#61

Post by pasc1878 »

oddthink wrote: post #28
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.

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.

You can run it from anywhere including where you downloaded that has user write access.

But you have to keep everything in the top directory and copy that around not the .app

It is not packaged as a Mac Application that is all in a .app file which you can copy to /Applications. Most of the other files should be in ~/Application Support or ~/Documents to meet normal macOS directories.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#62

Post by anigbrowl »

dylan604 wrote: post #33
dustingetz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you see in diagram 4, the doohickey is now interfacing directly with the thingamabob. Sometimes, it's also a good idea to help educate the user.

That's how this reads now. I had to read the GT page a few times before realizing it was a development environment for Smalltalk, specifically.

In general people who use a lot of buzzwords ('opinionated', 'beautiful' 'reactive') are trying to impress other developers already in their space. The more they use, the more alienating it is to interested general reader who doesn't have time to parse all this social coding and just wants information about a new topic.

This project looks great (for people who use Smalltalk), but the text does a poor job of communicating what it does and why you might want to use it. Even if you want to write a technical blogpost that gets into the weeds, there should be one plainly written short paragraph that summarizes what it's about for the first-time visitor who has no prior context.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#63

Post by stonogo »

svc wrote: post #44
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.

The author is not unwilling to explain, he has lots of experience trying to explain and knows how hard it can be. The best single sentence description, IMHO, is that GT (Glamorous Toolkit) is the current manifestation, implementation, proof of concept of the idea that making systems explainable through mouldable development is very powerful. Furthermore it is a very nice tool in its own right (again IMHO). Saying 'GT…

I've been reading much of this over the past day or so since I made the comment. I don't want to sound overly negative, but the author seems to think repetition of the phrase "moldable development" will imbue it with meaning, while my closest approach here is "notebook-style smalltalk ide."

Even when talking about "supporting" other languages, it's in terms of forcing everything into a smalltalk interface and then using that object model to introspect. None of the blog posts I've seen have convinced me that this isn't just Jupyter or Mathematica with a smalltalk kernel, and that's why I said what I did about the author's unwillingness to use common terms to describe the software. "Moldable development" doesn't mean anything.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#64

Post by stonogo »

tudorgirba wrote: post #51
FFP999 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 introduc…

I'll take a swing at that first paragraph:

"Glamorous Toolkit (GT) is a mature notebook-style integrated development environment. Our goal is to make systems explainable by means of custom tools created for each problem. Glamorous Toolkit makes the creation of those tools inexpensive and seamless."

Please note I did not mention 'moldable development' because I can't figure out what it is supposed to mean. "Creating custom tools for each development problem" is usually just called "programming". Introducing a new product and trying to define a new concept should happen in separate paragraphs, at the very least.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#65

Post by lukego »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #58
lukego wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've been following their work for the past five years or so. They have covered a lot of ground!

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#66

Post by tudorgirba »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #58
lukego wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There is a YouTube channel with a number of videos at different levels of detail.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#67

Post by tudorgirba »

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

It's meant as an environment in which developers can build tools for every single development problem they have. Literally. I know it can sound crazy, but that's what it is for. The claim is that this practice leads to a new way of programming called Moldable Development.

Re: What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?

#70

Post by tudorgirba »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #6

I had a fun time exploring both Glamorous Toolkit & BlueSky's @proto with https://github.com/feenkcom/gt4atproto . Neat experience. Docs & code meld nicely. Very handsome on experience.

Glad to hear it. Would you like to tell us more about what you found interesting (either here or on our Discord)? I am asking because that's my favorite public use case so far :).
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