[HN Gopher] What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?
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       What is Glamorous Toolkit v1.0?
        
       Author : rmhsilva
       Score  : 66 points
       Date   : 2023-11-05 17:30 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (lepiter.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (lepiter.io)
        
       | mark_l_watson wrote:
       | I haven't tried Glamorous for years with Pharo Smalltalk.
       | 
       | This is a great article, and convinced me to put refreshing Pharo
       | Smalltalk and installing Glamorous on my Mac.
        
       | stonogo wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | mattlondon wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | FFP999 wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | pavlov wrote:
             | 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.
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | I think it's a Smalltalk IDE?
        
         | lukego wrote:
         | It's well worth taking for a spin.
        
           | FFP999 wrote:
           | Can you only use it for Smalltalk code though?
        
             | lukego wrote:
             | The best I can say is that's analogous to asking if you can
             | only use Emacs for Emacs Lisp code.
        
             | PuercoPop wrote:
             | 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.
        
         | tdrgabi wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | smokel wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | sebastianconcpt wrote:
       | And this Rust object inspecting live is also rather interesting
       | https://lepiter.io/feenk/identifying-an-editor-bug-by-inspec...
        
       | jauntywundrkind wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | simonw wrote:
       | 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 thing as anything else.
       | 
       | Part of the problem is that the way you use Smalltalk is pretty
       | different from other programming languages already, due to the
       | thing where you work within an "image" as opposed to just editing
       | files on disk.
       | 
       | I emphasize with the challenge: I have a similar problem with my
       | https://datasette.io/ project.
        
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       (page generated 2023-11-05 23:00 UTC)