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by disago 1337 days ago
I struggled initially to understand what this was about. Then, after digging a little bit more, I see that it is an open and rich environment to visualize (while executing) data from different perspectives while being extensible from within the same environment (using Pharo), allowing to create a rich and custom ecosystem for data and systems exploration in an orderly and structured manner.

What I couldn't find is information about workshops or forums besides discord to talk and understand about its possibilities.

Specifically, I had trouble understanding how to apply it to other programming languages and their frameworks. I can see that for some of them (e.g. PHP) you have to export the project with a tool and then import it into GToolkit, but that converts such a system into just an static structure to be analyzed, but not a live system to experiment with. This would mean that live documentation would require permanently exporting and then importing the code from such system. To get a living system + its real time perspectives and embedded live documentation it seems you must program the system in Pharo.

1 comments

Thank you.

As someone who gets distracted way too much I usually require that a project can demonstrate why it might be interesting at a glance and this one failed pretty hard.

Luckily it was on HN so I could come to the comments to see if it was worth looking into more deeply - but ideally it should be able to do that by itself.

My choices were either 37m video - or a bunch of text that seemed too abstract and didn't explain "what this does" in a concise, down-to-earth manner.

Also mentioning "Smalltalk" would have been a really useful thing. The fact it sounded Smalltalky and I vaguely remember reading about Pharo was my only clue. The minute I understood this was related to Smalltalk a lot of other things fell into place.