Edward,
I'm happy to see that you have move on, finding value in Pharo (an
hopefully other links) despite of finding the "Stop writing dead
programs" condescending and even insulting.
Of course, the fact that robust and modern systems have been massively
constructed in a particular way, doesn't mean that is the only or best
one. Every culture (i.e. developers) has its blind spots and usually
people from other cultures (i.e. artist) can point them more easily (it
could happen in the other way also). The tradition of live coding that
is so... well alive in performative arts (like music or in Smalltalk) I
think that have relevant blind spots to point.
In my case, as a non-professional programmer I have found several
truisms in the developer community that are fiercely defended (use Git,
start with the "Hello world" example, write static text to represent a
dynamic system and so on). And I think that the acknowledge of not
knowing what we are doing can be seen not as as condescending critique,
but as an empowering practice/mindset (like the newbie mindset). I find
that resonant with Bret Victor's Future of Programming talk [1] and the
hypothesis of 70's innovation mostly driving by an exploring attitude
distant from truisms.
[1] http://worrydream.com/#!/TheFutureOfProgramming
Anyway the focus on the inspector seems a good starting point. My main
scripting language before was Python, and trying to find more
interactivity I used Jupyter (since the times where it was only IPython
notebook) and, in my case, being able to deepen into data/objects with
the inspector created a more fluent writing/exploring experience to work
with dynamic systems in Pharo/Lepiter than in Python/Jupyter. It could
provide inspiration for what is available in Leo, as Leo for me has
inspired what I would like to see of a outlining/writing experience in
Pharo/Lepiter (what I tried to prototype with Grafoscopio). And there
are places where Leo is still second to none (like in
reading/deconstructing complex code bases and/or documents).
Cheers,
Offray
On 16/09/23 10:27, Edward K. Ream wrote:
On Thursday, September 14, 2023 at 2:54:13 PM UTC-5 offray wrote:
Regarding the gap between static text and dynamic data, its
explorers and possible bridges, I think that the Smalltalk
tradition makes a good case for writing dynamic data instead of
static text.
Even in Pharo there is a distinction between the existing (static!)
program and the dynamic data on which it acts.
[1] https://pharo.org/
[2] https://mutabit.com/grafoscopio/en.html
[3] https://gtoolkit.com/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s
I'm unconvinced by these links.
The video "Stop writing dead programs" is condescending, even
insulting. Modern software includes the Mars lander and rover,
avionics for commercial airliners, large cad-based engineering
systems, browsers and their graphics engines, IDEs such as vs-code,
and AI software, such as the software for robots made by Boston
Dynamics. The video (and others like it) implies that hundreds of
thousands of engineers and scientists don't know what they are doing.
Maybe some of these projects use lisp, etc., but the rationales for
doing so had nothing to do with cute demos.
Let's move on. Pharo is a clever system. The main idea seems to be
that an app and its development environment can be the same. Alas,
there are many negatives.
Python is my dream language. I'm only interested in improving it.
Otoh, it's good to consider how we can improve our programming
practice. The Pharo videos stimulated those ideas.
For example, I'd like to make it easier to create unit tests. I didn't
write such tests for recent spelling-related PRs. That seems like a
mistake. An hour noodling about how to make unit tests for gui code
may have had a big payoff. I'm going to take another look.
*Summary*
I'm not interested in Pharo, but nobody needs my permission to use a
platform they love.
Thinking about Pharo has encouraged me to think about making Leo's
development less cumbersome.
Edward
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