[seagreen]

I love Smalltalk, and have done a reasonable amount of messing around with Cuis (which is awesome and everyone should try it).

However this gives you two things that Smalltalk doesn't:

1. It's language agnostic (boring I know)

2. It promotes keeping your code and written texts in the same system where they're both first class. That way they can link between each other, transclude each other, be published together, be organized the same way, etc. I really think this is the most interesting thing about the project, it really feels important to me.

Caveat: right now my written documents can link to/transclude code, but it doesn't work the other way yet. This is because the linearizer will see a link from code to documents as another definition and try to jam it in the source file. This would be an interesting use case for typed links, but Obsidian doesn't a have them AFAIK. Kind of cool since I haven't seen many other use cases for typed links in the wild.

EDIT: It occurs to me that I've never used a Smalltalk notetaking or word processing program. Are there any that are integrated with the System Browser, so that they can link to (or even better embed) code? If anyone has more info please let me know!

[couchbed]

Lepiter is a Pharo-based notetaking app within the Glamorous Toolkit. I'm not sure it's mature enough to compete with Obsidian/etc., but it does allow linked and embedded code like you were thinking.

https://lepiter.io/feenk/introducing-lepiter--knowledge-mana...

[seagreen]

Of course! I should have just guessed they'd already have something like this.

We either need to port ALL of Glamorous Toolkit to mainstream langs or we need to convince all our employers to switch to Smalltalk. I am not certain which of those is possible or easier.

[skeledrew]

I'd say the porting is better. I've gone a ways into using GToolkit, and it has some very nice things. I especially like the infinite nesting of editors, which is like transclusion on steroids, and the driller. And it's already language agnostic and very extendable.

But when it comes to actually extending it, that's where the sharp edges start to cut. I was able to do a fairly quick, enhanced Python support extension, but one of the issues is getting proper class equivalence, and the back-and-forth passage of data is a major performance suck. Also things will grind to a halt if you push and try to process too much data at once on the Smalltalk side. Maybe having a fairly beefy machine will help with that though.