[simonw]

OK, having watched the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqogvp1dGpk (8 minutes, so 4 minutes if you 2x it) I understand why they have such a hard time answering the question "What is Glamorous Toolkit?"

It's effectively a combination of a Smalltalk IDE, a Jupyter/Observable-style notebook environment and a tool somewhat like R Studio.

It's a hard thing to categorize, because it's not exactly the same kind of thing as anything else.

Part of the problem is that the way you use Smalltalk is pretty different from other programming languages already, due to the thing where you work within an "image" as opposed to just editing files on disk.

I emphasize with the challenge: I have a similar problem with my https://datasette.io/ project.

[dustingetz]

solution formula: talk to your users, write down the words they use, explain it back to them using their own words

[dylan604]

If you see in diagram 4, the doohickey is now interfacing directly with the thingamabob.

Sometimes, it's also a good idea to help educate the user.

[anigbrowl]

That's how this reads now. I had to read the GT page a few times before realizing it was a development environment for Smalltalk, specifically.

In general people who use a lot of buzzwords ('opinionated', 'beautiful' 'reactive') are trying to impress other developers already in their space. The more they use, the more alienating it is to interested general reader who doesn't have time to parse all this social coding and just wants information about a new topic.

This project looks great (for people who use Smalltalk), but the text does a poor job of communicating what it does and why you might want to use it. Even if you want to write a technical blogpost that gets into the weeds, there should be one plainly written short paragraph that summarizes what it's about for the first-time visitor who has no prior context.

[dustingetz]

that’s called documentation and it is mostly read post-activation. What’s read during onboarding is the “quickstart”, and they only attempt it after they’ve decided the offering matches their problem

[chrisweekly]

"I emphasize with the challenge: I have a similar problem"

empathize, not emphasize

[debo_]

Your comment emphasizes that you don't empathize with typos.

[Timwi]

Please don't shit on people who are trying to help and inform.

[jagged-chisel]

Pretty sure it was tongue-in-cheek observation, not an insult

[debo_]

It was a joke. I got tired of labelling jokes, but this is the outcome.

[dylan604]

since when is using the wrong word a typo? it's not like they said empathise

[mattnewton]

Since autocorrect on phones most likely

[jdiff]

That wouldn't have even been a typo, that's just a different regional spelling of the same word

[simonw]

It was a typo.

[cxr]

> It's a hard thing to categorize, because it's not exactly the same kind of thing as anything else.

It's not too difficult to get close.

"It's the visual equivalent of Unix pipes."

"It's a browser inspector with an infinite/unbounded amount of Miller columns." (NB: the browser here is a Smalltalk browser and not a Web browser.)

Etc.

[bradrn]

After seeing the video, the closest I can get is: ‘it’s like a Smalltalk equivalent of Emacs org-mode, but even more dynamic’.

Which makes sense as an analogy: org-mode is also famously hard to explain, and adding more dynamism just makes it harder.

[nylonstrung]

Glamorous seems like something no one asked for- aggregating a bunch of semi-related tools into a jack-of-all trades platform. I don't understand who it is for

Datasette is awesome btw

[tudorgirba]

It's meant as an environment in which developers can build tools for every single development problem they have. Literally. I know it can sound crazy, but that's what it is for. The claim is that this practice leads to a new way of programming called Moldable Development.

[worthless-trash]

At some point, everything is something no one asks for.