[tudorgirba]

Interesting questions!

Glamorous Toolkit is indeed built by the team at feenk, which is a company. However, we created the company to fund the research, not the other way around. Everything we do is free and open-source.

Our goal is not to build Glamorous Toolkit, but to validate the idea that what we call Moldable Development (programming through contextual tools) leads to explainable systems.

We start from legacy systems because that's a hard problem that is not yet solved. If we are to find a new way of working, it should work in the least favorable conditions. With legacy systems, we have extreme combinations of technologies and inter-twinned domain knowledge that we have to make sense of.

At first the approach was called humane assessment, but along the way we found that it actually does change forward engineering as well. For example, we've seen cases in which startups produce pitches for investors right from the development environment. Or teams that put a face on domain-driven design by showing the domain to business people from the development environment leading to co-development. Glamorous Toolkit itself is an extensive case study of Moldable Development, too.

More recently, we also apply the same ideas to creating editing experiences as well. Imagine editors of generic languages that understand the framework or the domain and that offer inline activities.

Yet another application area is that of code transformation. It turns out that we can describe large scale code transformations through contextual transformations as well. This then allows us to evolve large code bases seamlessly.

This can work if creating a new experience is inexpensive. And this can be achieved if we can compose the overall experience out of tiny pieces. Micro tools like views in the inspector, custom debuggers, dedicated editors or even transformations.

There are a few more details at moldabledevelopment.com including the beginning of an open book I am writing with Simon Wardley.

Does this address your questions?

[acureau]

Thanks for your time Tudor, I didn't intend by any means to diminish your work by associating it with your company. I had read the first two chapters of your open book, and I found it useful to understand how the idea of moldable development came about and what problem it was trying to solve.

I think it has finally clicked in my mind. You're building a way to represent systems that is richer than text, which ideally reduces cognitive load when trying to understand or modify them. Since every system is different, this requires custom code, and that's normally expensive. GT is an attempt at reducing the cost of developing custom meta-programming tools. Building systems with rich representations from the very start is moldable development. Is this accurate?

[tudorgirba]

Nice summary!

Indeed, we regard software engineering as being primarily decision making. This is a stark departure from the typical perception of software engineering as a construction activity.

Once you take this path, the tools are going to be different. So different that they will appear odd to most people used to the other point of view.

For example, a typical development environment will start with an editor. But editing should come after reading. So, that design is really not that ideal. Having the editing come at the end is perhaps more appropriate. And there are several other such consequences that stem from that original difference in points of view.