21 Dec
2018
21 Dec
'18
11:02 p.m.
Hi,
I share your feeling of wonder and also concern Luke.
In my case, I used (old) GT tools to prototype Grafoscopio and now that
the PhD thesis is practically done and only dissertation is pending, I
would like to prepare myself to migrate Grafoscopio to Pharo 7,
including bug fixing, stability, improved functionality, Iceberg for
code management (but supporting Fossil instead of Git).
I think that there is a lot of possibilities in the new GT tools and I
like some of them going into interactive documentation (a line I was
trying to explore with Pharo using Grafoscopio). But anytime I tried to
use it I stumble upon a stop:
* First time was something related with me having some kind of
credential enabled in GitHub to simple use it. I lost a whole
morning just enabling that and reporting it. It was related with
some mozilla library for font redering that didn't work well at the end.
* Today I tried with the prebuild Linux image and Pharo Launcher, but
I got an error message about inability to determine proper VM and
when I tried installing it from Pharo 7 I got something related with
a MemoryFileWriteStream dependency to be resolved before proper
installation.
I understand that this is alpha software and demos look amazing, but
just running them requires a lot of work that previous GT didn't require.
This brings me this feeling that these jumps in Pharo put core of the
user experience at risk (kind of) and you end wondering how much an old
tech will be maintained once the jump to the new shinny stuff is done
and which is the migration path.
In my case, I would like to have something like a Zeroconf script that
just takes care of the external libraries, VM and image, to have a real
glipmse of the upcoming future, beside the Tweets (which look great
BTW). Maybe it will happen in a year or two, once it is properly
integrated with Pharo, Zeroconf and thought for "end users" of
interactive documents, which don't want to enable GitHub stuff, deal
with external rendering dependencies and so on. Now the experience of
using GT is kind of hostile for that users.
Anyway, keep the good work and sharing it. Hopefully at some point it
will reach the beta status, where users like myself can use it smoothly
and build on GT's promises and interesting features.
Cheers,
Offray
On 21/12/18 10:59, Luke Gorrie wrote:
On Thu, 20 Dec 2018 at 10:58, Tudor Girba
<tudor(a)tudorgirba.com
<mailto:tudor@tudorgirba.com>> wrote:
The goal of the new GT is to propose a completely reshaped
programming experience that enables moldable development. You will
find the concepts from the old GT in the new world as well. For
example, the Inspector is extensible in similar ways and the API
is similar as well.
[...]
Does this address the concern?
I am not sure yet :).
Programming is not our main use case for GT. We are using GT as an
object inspector (etc) for examining diagnostic data. We have a
Smalltalk application that's similar to GDB and we are using GT as the
front-end.
In our world we use the Inspector and the Spotter but all of the
Smalltalk programming views are hidden. GT is "molded" to be a
diagnostic tool *instead of* a programming environment. Specifically,
our main use case is inspecting/debugging the operation of a JIT
compiler written in C. We have Smalltalk code to load binary coredumps
from the JIT, decode them using DWARF debug information, and represent
the application-level compiler data structures as Smalltalk objects.
This way we can use GT to browse generated code, cross-reference
profiler data, examine runtime compilation errors, etc.
The "old" GT is awesome for this. I feel like this application is also
very much in the spirit of the "moldable tools" thesis. Lots of
diagnostic workflows ultimately boil down to drill-down inspecting
and/or searching.
I don't know where we stand with respect to the "new" GT though. I am
talking about diagnostics, you are talking about programming. I am
talking about zeros and ones, you are talking about feelings. I am
maintaining a stable application, you are talking about rewrites. I am
having a hard time whether I should be switching to the new GT in the
immediate future, or waiting another year or two for it to mature, or
planning to stick with the old GT.
Hints would be appreciated :)
I reiterate that I think you guys are doing fantastic work - some of
the most interesting work in the programming universe to my mind. I
hope that this discussion is useful for at least understanding the
thought process of some users / potential users.
Cheers!
-Luke
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