5 ms·

I periodically check in on this and I can never understand what its really good for.

by nathan_compton 2y ago

kossae 2y ago
Yeah I made a decent effort to dig in, as it seemed interesting, but I still have no idea what this is.
- rizky05 2y ago
  [dead]
- beefnugs 2y ago
  I feel like the reason this isn't an obvious big deal yet, is because we don't have in real life the ideal use case: which would be a really complex vehicle ( like a real world mech). Something that needs a bunch of tweakable manufacturer control systems, but also massive customization through customer code. And maybe this will never exist, because capitalism is all about vendor lock in.
  - photonthug 2y ago
    I think you're on to something here. Squeak/Pharo were/are in many ways an interesting and sort of obvious base for building things like IDEs, DAWs, CAD systems, other things that are heavy on interactivity, visualizations, and components. I don't know for sure, but it seems like there would be enough escape hatches for interoperability so it's not like you'd be actually be required to do everything in small talk, and certainly there's FFI (https://books.pharo.org/booklet-uffi/ https://books.pharo.org/booklet-uffi/ ). Empowering user customization and such is actually a big downside for commercial activities though. The last paragraph here ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#Image-based_persistence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#Image-based_persiste... ) is directly raising the concern of how things can stay proprietary. Besides that.. increasingly devs themselves are very commercial and not exactly in it for the love of the game. They are actively hostile towards stuff that isn't pushed on them by business, and not very interested in creative activity that pushes the bounds of the possible. I think you can see some of this in the insistence on "it's just a notebook" comparisons here, but before that.. docker was also "just another VM" to most until it was absolutely too big to ignore. It's more than comparing to what you know, it's almost actively refusing to be curious / interested. So maybe it's burnout from unnecessary churn in tech, or maybe people just resist entertaining the idea that interesting new ideas are even possible until it's pretty directly affecting their ability to be hired. Maybe both.
    - tudorgirba 2y ago
      In Glamorous Toolkit we have extensive infrastructure to interoperate with Rust. In fact, the main app is a Rust app that relies on several other Rust plugins. The Pharo Virtual Machine is used as a library :). I enjoy your comparison with Docker. Indeed, the comparison to what you know is inevitable and it works quite well for incremental news. It works less well for new. But it's still on us, the authors, to try to find ways to communicate differently to appeal to a larger audience especially as our goal is to educate. I am also of the opinion that the most interesting path is to get someone to create outsized value that cannot be ignored. Our current focus is to find those initial someones :).
  - tudorgirba 2y ago
    We actually have quite a number of real life use cases. For example, in one company it's being in used as the only development environment for 100+ developers. We also use it for making sense of and modernize legacy systems that people do not know what to do with anymore.
neuroelectron 2y ago
Reproducible devops
tudorgirba 2y ago
Thank you for the feedback. Our latest attempt to explain why Glamorous Toolkit exists comes in a book I am writing with Simon Wardley in the open about Moldable Development. See it here: https://medium.com/feenk/rewilding-software-engineering-900ca95ebc8c https://medium.com/feenk/rewilding-software-engineering-900c... If you happen to have the time to look at it, I would be very much interested in feedback. In particular, does the environment makes more sense in the context of the problem described in the book?
- throwaway74639 2y ago
  People shouldn't have to read a book to know what Glamorous Toolkit is good for.
  - tudorgirba 2y ago
    Thank you. Reading a book is entirely voluntary. I was offering it as a suggestion for the person that had the original question and which seemed interested in learning more.
- nathan_compton 2y ago
  Right - moldable development makes sense to me, but presently I feel like I can do all these things by glueing tools together with Emacs. If you had an implementation of ggplot style plotting native to Glamorous Toolkit that would definitely catch my attention, though. Nowadays I typically tie together Python, R, and other languages with Emacs being my sort of control center. I get the impression Glamorous Toolkit could step in here but it seems like such a lift to reach feature parity with a set of tools and GTK doesn't seem to integrate as well with other stuff as Emacs does, partly because Emacs just accepts that throwing around a bunch of text is 80% of what I want. I'm a scientist/data scientist.
  - tom_ 2y ago
    This has been on my todo list for a while, as I like Simon Wardley, but I've never quite got round to using it. But I use Emacs a lot, and Emacs was the thing that sprang to mind when reading the blurb. It looks like there's this similar vibe of making custom tools easy, with there being an expectation that this is something the average user will actually do. Compare and contrast the experience of extending Emacs with, say, writing a Visual Studio Code extension. (N.B., it has not escaped my notice that Visual Studio Code is more popular...) The GUI possibilities of Emacs are a bit limited though. Glamorous Toolkit looks better in that respect. I need to actually try it! Something possibly similar is Studio: https://github.com/studio/studio https://github.com/studio/studio - also Smalltalk. But seemingly dead (or at least sleeping). I encountered this via its author's RaptorJIT project, a fork of LuaJIT apparently intended to turn it into something maintainable by mere mortals: https://github.com/lukego/blog/issues/19 https://github.com/lukego/blog/issues/19 - some videos here: https://www.youtube.com/@lukego/streams https://www.youtube.com/@lukego/streams

I periodically check in on this and I can never understand what its really good for.

kossae 2y ago

Yeah I made a decent effort to dig in, as it seemed interesting, but I still have no idea what this is.

rizky05 2y ago
[dead]
beefnugs 2y ago
I feel like the reason this isn't an obvious big deal yet, is because we don't have in real life the ideal use case: which would be a really complex vehicle ( like a real world mech). Something that needs a bunch of tweakable manufacturer control systems, but also massive customization through customer code. And maybe this will never exist, because capitalism is all about vendor lock in.
- photonthug 2y ago
  I think you're on to something here. Squeak/Pharo were/are in many ways an interesting and sort of obvious base for building things like IDEs, DAWs, CAD systems, other things that are heavy on interactivity, visualizations, and components. I don't know for sure, but it seems like there would be enough escape hatches for interoperability so it's not like you'd be actually be required to do everything in small talk, and certainly there's FFI (https://books.pharo.org/booklet-uffi/ https://books.pharo.org/booklet-uffi/ ). Empowering user customization and such is actually a big downside for commercial activities though. The last paragraph here ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#Image-based_persistence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#Image-based_persiste... ) is directly raising the concern of how things can stay proprietary. Besides that.. increasingly devs themselves are very commercial and not exactly in it for the love of the game. They are actively hostile towards stuff that isn't pushed on them by business, and not very interested in creative activity that pushes the bounds of the possible. I think you can see some of this in the insistence on "it's just a notebook" comparisons here, but before that.. docker was also "just another VM" to most until it was absolutely too big to ignore. It's more than comparing to what you know, it's almost actively refusing to be curious / interested. So maybe it's burnout from unnecessary churn in tech, or maybe people just resist entertaining the idea that interesting new ideas are even possible until it's pretty directly affecting their ability to be hired. Maybe both.
  - tudorgirba 2y ago
    In Glamorous Toolkit we have extensive infrastructure to interoperate with Rust. In fact, the main app is a Rust app that relies on several other Rust plugins. The Pharo Virtual Machine is used as a library :). I enjoy your comparison with Docker. Indeed, the comparison to what you know is inevitable and it works quite well for incremental news. It works less well for new. But it's still on us, the authors, to try to find ways to communicate differently to appeal to a larger audience especially as our goal is to educate. I am also of the opinion that the most interesting path is to get someone to create outsized value that cannot be ignored. Our current focus is to find those initial someones :).
- tudorgirba 2y ago
  We actually have quite a number of real life use cases. For example, in one company it's being in used as the only development environment for 100+ developers. We also use it for making sense of and modernize legacy systems that people do not know what to do with anymore.

neuroelectron 2y ago

Reproducible devops

tudorgirba 2y ago

Thank you for the feedback. Our latest attempt to explain why Glamorous Toolkit exists comes in a book I am writing with Simon Wardley in the open about Moldable Development. See it here: https://medium.com/feenk/rewilding-software-engineering-900ca95ebc8c https://medium.com/feenk/rewilding-software-engineering-900c... If you happen to have the time to look at it, I would be very much interested in feedback. In particular, does the environment makes more sense in the context of the problem described in the book?

throwaway74639 2y ago
People shouldn't have to read a book to know what Glamorous Toolkit is good for.
- tudorgirba 2y ago
  Thank you. Reading a book is entirely voluntary. I was offering it as a suggestion for the person that had the original question and which seemed interested in learning more.
nathan_compton 2y ago
Right - moldable development makes sense to me, but presently I feel like I can do all these things by glueing tools together with Emacs. If you had an implementation of ggplot style plotting native to Glamorous Toolkit that would definitely catch my attention, though. Nowadays I typically tie together Python, R, and other languages with Emacs being my sort of control center. I get the impression Glamorous Toolkit could step in here but it seems like such a lift to reach feature parity with a set of tools and GTK doesn't seem to integrate as well with other stuff as Emacs does, partly because Emacs just accepts that throwing around a bunch of text is 80% of what I want. I'm a scientist/data scientist.
- tom_ 2y ago
  This has been on my todo list for a while, as I like Simon Wardley, but I've never quite got round to using it. But I use Emacs a lot, and Emacs was the thing that sprang to mind when reading the blurb. It looks like there's this similar vibe of making custom tools easy, with there being an expectation that this is something the average user will actually do. Compare and contrast the experience of extending Emacs with, say, writing a Visual Studio Code extension. (N.B., it has not escaped my notice that Visual Studio Code is more popular...) The GUI possibilities of Emacs are a bit limited though. Glamorous Toolkit looks better in that respect. I need to actually try it! Something possibly similar is Studio: https://github.com/studio/studio https://github.com/studio/studio - also Smalltalk. But seemingly dead (or at least sleeping). I encountered this via its author's RaptorJIT project, a fork of LuaJIT apparently intended to turn it into something maintainable by mere mortals: https://github.com/lukego/blog/issues/19 https://github.com/lukego/blog/issues/19 - some videos here: https://www.youtube.com/@lukego/streams https://www.youtube.com/@lukego/streams