[Grumbledour]

I am so conflicted about this project every time it comes up.

I think I understood for quite some time what it wants to do (Though when checking the website there always creeps in doubt, because it is so incomprehensible) and every year when I download the application again, it looks a bit more cleaner, a bit easier to just use. But still, basic things always elude me. Do I really have to read the handbook to figure out how to format text in the knowledge base? Half the windows and symbols just make no sense, etc. Try pressing a button to see what it does and now everything looks different and what even happened?

It seems to glacially improve on that front and I know to really use it, I have to learn to program it, but I am also of the mind basic functionality should be self explanatory. And pharo itself as the basis of this seems so convoluted and complex, I wonder if I even want to get into this.

And then, the community seems to solely be on discord still, and that is then always the point were I bow out and wonder if cuis smalltalk or other systems with simplicity as core tenant are not much nicer to use and I should look there. Of course, in the end, I never get more than surface deep into smalltalk, because while I want the tools to build my own environment, if I need to build them first, there is always more pressing work...

But honestly, a great knowledge base and data visualization I can intuitively just use and then expand later on with my own programs sounds like a dream workspace. It's just, that it is really hard to get into at the moment. I don't know any python, but I could just use jupyter know and learn as I go, but sadly, I never get that feeling here.

[7thaccount]

I'm basically in the same boat with this and all the smalltalk systems I have tried. The environment is just so foreign. I get the gist for how programming works in pharo (have also looked at Squeak and Cuis), but Python just seems a lot more natural. It is also hard to find snippets of useful code on stack overflow for smalltalk for the things I want to do. Maybe copilot is better there. The more practical problem is I'd never be able to justify using any of this for corporate work.

[sakesun]

Even worse there are groups of people who keep praising it and keep us curious through these years. Yet none of remarkable applications built with it except the tool itself.

[seertaak]

I see what you're saying, but looking at the video, which shows playgrounds and notes, I'm quite excited to try this because it looks a lot like jupyterlab. Jupyterlab is familiar to any data scientist, but while it's easy to use, it's quite awkward to extend due to the latter being based on a plugin system (understandably) based on typescript.

Here it's all one system, and thinking of the image as a key-value store feels quite natural too. Finally, the UI with panes that go right also feels natural and looks quite slick. I wonder if it's easy to switch between languages? Like can the key-value store pass data to a python program, or use an Apache arrow table?

[tudorgirba]

Glamorous Toolkit is built in Smalltalk, but it is not intended for you to build systems using Smalltalk. It is a technology for building development environments for your systems. That's not quite the same. Oh, and we use it in corporate settings just fine, too :).

[tudorgirba]

Thank you for the describing the interest.

You do not have to read the handbook to format the text. You can use Markdown in a text snippet :). This gives you a compressed overview: https://book.gtoolkit.com/understanding-lepiter-in-7--6n7q1o...

> I know to really use it, I have to learn to program it, but I am also of the mind basic functionality should be self explanatory. And pharo itself as the basis of this seems so convoluted and complex...

We use Pharo as a programming language for building the system, and most extensions are expected to be written in it. It's possible to connect to other runtimes, like Python or JS, and extend the object inspector that works with remote objects using those languages. But overall, learning Pharo is a bit of a prerequisite. I certainly understand that it can appear foreign, but convoluted and complex are not an attributes I would associate with it :).

Now, in GT, the environment is built from the ground up anew and it's different from classic interfaces found in Pharo or Cuis. And of course, it's different from typical development environment, too, because we wanted to build a different kind of interface in which visualization is a first class entity.

Our community is indeed on Discord a lot, but we also host discussions on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/feenkcom/gtoolkit/discussions

In any case, I am happy you find the need for "a great knowledge base and data visualization" relevant and useful.

[jes5199]

I’m in the same boat, I really like the idea of it but the actual use of it eludes me. It’s like there’s a cultural gap, even when they’re talking about the practical applications of the system it’s incomprehensible; I eventually came to the conclusion that they are doing a lot of work to deal with situations that I have never even heard of people being in

[tudorgirba]

Interesting observation.

The problem we address is how to understand a situation about a software system without relying on reading code.

Reading code is the most expensive activity today in software engineering. We read code because we want to understand enough to decide how to change the system. The activity is actually decision making. Reading is just the way we extract information from the system. Where there is a way, there can be others.

In our case, we say that for every question we have about the system it's possible to create tools that give you the answer. Perhaps a question is why not use standard tools? As systems are highly contextual, we cannot predict the specific problems so standard tools will always require extra manual work. The alternative is to build the tools during development, after you know the problem. For this to be practical, the creation of the tools must be inexpensive, and this is what GT shows to be possible.

This might sound theoretical, but it turns out that we can apply it to various kinds of problems: browsing and making sense of an API that has no documentation, finding dependencies in code, applying transformations over a larger code base, exploring observability logs and so on.

Does this help in any way?

[tunaoftheland]

Thank you for putting into words your frustrations with trying to grok GT and Pharo, which matches mine. It's too bad because I can sense the fascinating technologies and the possibilities of a great developer experience that are there, but there is a lot of tribal and historic knowledge surrounding smalltalk that can be quite impenetrable.

I have been thinking about my own experience trying to learn Pharo and GT and came to the conclusion that, because of the nature of smalltalk, written form of teaching materials are not effective and in fact even painful to learn from. Nothing wrong with the smalltalk approach of computing, such as GUI-centric and image-based environment. They are what makes it so interesting and an immersive development environment. But video tutorials and live-session hand-holding are what's needed to teach these environments because of the highly interactive nature of smalltalk. The Pharo MOOC exists, but that requires the type of academic-level time and mental commitment of back when I was in school. And as a hobbyist, I have less-demanding options for learning that are also interesting so I end up pausing my efforts to learn Pharo/GT.

It's a tough situation for smalltalk proponents because interactive instruction material are very costly to produce and maintain. And the smalltalk communities are much smaller and they have don't massive corporate sponsors. Even cheaply-made YouTube videos take time and effort, and I am grateful for those who make them out of their enthusiasm for the technology!. But I'm afraid I've been conditioned to watch slick, engaging video content with clear, well-paced voice tracks and accurate captioning.

I do wonder if the smalltalk community could benefit from a beginner-friendly, simplified version of Pharo UI that starts up in a Jupyter notebook interface and expose only limited tooling, to give the learner a taste of what's possible and has some guardrails to prevent the user getting lost. Gradually revealing the Pharo/GT features that way would keep the learner engaged and motivated. Because of the above-mentioned challenges with producing teaching content, self-guided interactive learning tools would be the best bang-for-buck, I think. I thought the Elixir language manual was excellent and it was the first language reference doc I actually enjoyed reading! (Until it got to the string handling... then I ran out of attention span, lol) Elixir also have Livebook.dev which gives notebook interface. Could be a good inspiration.

Another possibly dumb idea I had was that maybe smalltalk is an ideal companion to current LLM tool/function calling APIs, where an LLM can "guide" a live smalltalk environment for developing an application through an API. Since a smalltalk environment is always running, it can also (maybe) feed relevant live state context back to the LLM with some feedback prompts... I suppose a smalltalk envrion can serve as a sort of memory for LLM as well as an agent for modifying the smalltalk environ?

Sorry, didn't mean for this to sound like "you must do this for free for my mild interest in your passion project!" This has been more of a stream-of-consciousness spillage onto this forum because Grumbledour's excellent comment resonated with me. :) And the mention of notebook interface clicked in my head.

Anyway, sorry for ranting, and thank you GT/Pahro team for making something fascinating! Stuff like this is what keeps me in the technology field instead of totally leaving it out of frustration with the where tech meets business!

[stronglikedan]

> I have to learn to program it, but I am also of the mind basic functionality should be self explanatory.

It explains it right on the site: "To learn how to program it, first learn how to learn inside the environment." /s