[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.