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 Thu, 20 Dec 2018 at 10:58, Tudor Girba <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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