Hi,

Thanks for detailing your thoughts.

Indeed, I know about your application. Whatever you can do with the current GT you will be able to do with the new one.

Except that for the new one you will be able to do extra things. Here are a few:
- You can build and share documents that embed those inspector views. This can be useful for reporting or sharing diagnostics with your users.
- Because the underlying rendering engine is much more powerful, you can express modern and interfaces that integrate with the rest of the environment smoothly.
- You likely have to deal with log files that might get large. First, the new editor allows you to smoothly work with such files. But, you can go well beyond this. Imagine that you build a tooling that produces the same editor only the text is interactive, and you might even embed visual artifacts right in the text to bridge the gap between what you would see in a typical console. For example, this tweet shows the new Transcript used to debug an animation. For every animation frame, we output the text corresponding with the frame and we insert the graphical preview corresponding to that step.

You look at GT from the point of view of an end-user. You likely like the fact that you could mold the environment to your context and that you could do this incrementally. It happens that the same principles and tools can be applied to the whole programming, and once you do that, you actually can fundamentally change the act of programming. In fact, the same thing applies to the old GT: we built the new GT using that version and we believe that this allowed us to work much faster than if we would have used more traditional tools. The new GT pushes the envelope significantly further.

So, that is why we are excited about that perspective, but even if you do not spend much time programming in Pharo, you can still take advantage for the user point of view as described above :).

Is this answer better?

Cheers,
Doru

On Dec 21, 2018, at 4:59 PM, Luke Gorrie <luke@snabb.co> wrote:

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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