ideas VS gtoolkit

I wrote some notes about this of what I want in my "life engine":

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#5-life-engine

I never got into the quantified self but I did want a portal (such as similar to the Yahoo! and Excite.com days) in the early 2000s. of personal details that I can take actions on.

Then a few years later I wrote about "life situational awareness apps"

I want my phone and desktop computer system try to have widgets for "accommodation", "travel", "food".

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3#59-life-indicators---sit...

I did write a question generator feed dashboard written in Electron that let you snap in data collectors that would let you save records of stock purchases and facts about yourself such as your salary. The idea is that you could get advice based on what you answer.

https://github.com/samsquire/living-documents

https://github.com/samsquire/living-documents-library (the app repository)

Unfortunately it's probably not buildable and I forgot to take screenshots or videos.

My blogging/journalling setup is simple.

I just use GitHub. I just rely on the default repository view on GitHub.com

I create a README.md and add markdown headings to the bottom or to the top (bottom if its a journal, top if it's a blog) and then when I get to 100-800 I create a new repository and repeat.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas (2013)

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2

Thanks for posting this Ask HN question.

I journal ideas and thoughts about computers and software. I am interested in software architecture, parallelism, async, coroutines, database internals, programming language implementation, software design and the web.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas (2013)

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4 <-- this is recent but needs editing

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas5 <-- this is what I'm working on now

https://github.com/samsquire/startups

https://github.com/samsquire/blog <-- thoughts I want to write about, but incomplete

I use README.md on GitHub and create a heading at the bottom for each entry. I use Typora on Windows or the GitHub web interface to edit.

In 2013 I wrote about "game interfaces for work" where work interfaces should act like games. Real time strategy games make you feel empowered, if you could queue up real work in a units runqueue. Of course you'll have actions besides "build" and "attack" to map to the richness of the world.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#71-gaming-interfaces-for-...

Even the mouse is a database

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#12-the-package-manager-pa...

I call these branching libraries.

Definition: Use one kind of thing as another kind of thing.

Given X do Y

Generics gets us some of the way to what we want.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#48-branching-libraries

Using a database as a spreadsheet or a spreadsheet as a database, using a spreadsheet as a functional programming language or bash pipeline editor with each cell being the output of that pipeline step. Or reactive programming with spreadsheets.

I am trying to solve the expression problem. To introduce a new thing into an old thing you typically need to implement hundreds of functions on an interface.

Remember that all science, mathematics, theology comes from understanding an idea. So ideas are valuable to society. If you think they're worthless, then I don't want your ideas, I want people in academia and industry to have good ideas and push society forward. Science, mathematics, theories, research, theology all are built on the shoulders of giants, with ideas that provide foundations of truth to push society forward.

The more ideas you have and the more you work on them the more you grow as a person. I also work on building software to put my ideas to the test.

I journal/blog all my computer and technology related ideas on GitHub out in the open.

I have published 700+ ideas on GitHub. I create a repository called "ideas" then I journal 100-400 ideas using markdown and then create a new repository and repeat. They're all in markdown and written as simple numbered markdown headings and a few one paragraph to a page of notes. They should be enough to understand the idea and do something with it. I reread my ideas repeatedly and I uncover new ideas from my existing ideas. Ideas should be built on and improved precept by precept.

For reference, they're about software design, software architecture, parallelism, multithreading, efficiency, growth, futurism, progress.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas <- 2013

I am more likely to journal and blog if the friction to creating a post is as simple as opening a document and writing. The important part of journalling or note software is that you actually create notes. I did use Hetzner to run a Wordpress blog but it had an overhead of server expenses and keeping Wordpress up-to-date.

I don't want my data trapped in a proprietary system where it is difficult to export, so I use plaintext. I looked into Publii [1] but I prefer my current plaintext setup. Today I journal software ideas, computer ideas, startup ideas and community ideas on GitHub in the open, as README.md files. My journal is all public on GitHub at the following links. There are over 550+ journal entries, I am sure you shall enjoy them.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4

https://github.com/samsquire/startups

https://getpublii.com/

I wrote a living document interface. Nowadays it's probably similar to notion.

The idea was you could write code into it and see all the data structures of the code you wrote. There's a screencast and the code is available but broken. It's written in Angular 1. There was a cool feature where you could select different things on the screen for searching for an operation for them to merge them together.

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/3064a94d00812c1373c4eb3b2...

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#4-living-documents

Your ideas sounded very much like a mixup of Common Lisp with SLIME, Smalltalk interactivity and Unison-like storage of code in a database instead of files.

I've tried all of them, I think the closest thing I've seen to what you describe, which I also find very attractive, is the GT Smalltalk environment: https://gtoolkit.com/

Have you tried that? They call this idea "moldable development" as you can "mold" your environment to your needs.

Even though I loved it, I ended up not using it much, mostly because it's a bit too heavy to keep handy for exploration all the time when needed (it takes like 1GB of RAM even when idle!)... as I already can do most of that with emacs, which is much lighter, I just stick with it.

> This power that Smalltalk systems have where the code runs in a GUI that is also the editor/debugger/etc has deeply fascinated me recently.

Have you tried emacs?

> And I'd like to actually understand a tool that I'd have to dive into that deeply, and I think I'll never have the time to truly understand all of the VM, the classes, etc.

I've recently tried to do that myself with Smalltalk via the Glamorous Toolkit[1] (a beautiful, modern Smalltalk environment based on Pharo). Because the programming environment itself comes with a Book teaching it, you can basically just read it as a normal digital book, but with the superpower that everything is editable and interactive: you can change the book itself, every code example is runnable and you can inspect the result objects right there, change it, modify the view for it... they say it's "moldable development" because you almost literally mold the environment as you write your code and learn about the platform.

> And I'd like to be able to create applications that run without shipping the entire Smalltalk VM.

That's why even though I really enjoyed SmallTalk, I can't really see it as anything more than a curiosity. I tried using it at least for my own occasional data exploration because it has good visualisation capabilities and super easy to use HTTP client/JSON parser etc., but the system is so heavy (1GB+ of RAM) that I couldn't justify keeping it open all the time like I do with emacs, on the offchance that I might need to use it for some small task.

Anyway, perhaps that's something you might be interested in.

[1] https://gtoolkit.com/

I have been building a drawing and animation system in Pharo (smalltalk) for a few months, using a really neat new UI called glamorous toolkit.

Last time I tried to "hydrate" thousands of SQL rows into objects and both Pharo and the Glamorous Toolkit froze up. Maybe that is to be expected, but I've done that a million times on the JVM without any problems.

In my opinion the idea is more than direct data manipulation. It is about how we get feedback. In drawing, the medium to draw is the same medium to read. In programming, there is often a mismatch - coding on a text file, running on somewhere else, e.g. terminal, browser, remote server. If you count surrounding activities for programming, like versioning, debugging, metering and profiling, even more system is involved. We are not even touching the myriad of SaaS offering each tackling carve out a little pie out of the programming life cycle.

Back to your question, from my naive understanding, smalltalk seems to be an all in one environment. The Glamorous Toolkit [1] seems to be that environment on steroid. I have no useful experience to share though.

https://gtoolkit.com/

Wrote a review on it on the website, copypasting:

Glamorous Toolkit[1] promotes the idea of moldable development[2].

There's a talk on it: Tudor Gîrba - Moldable development.[3]

The basic idea is to have multiple views and editors for any piece of data in your system (including code). Kind of interesting, but the toolkit looks and acts more like a fancy computational notebook type of environment, but without explicitly being a computational notebook.

The site on moldable development states its difference with literate programming:

They are similar in that they both promote the use of narratives for depicting systems. However, Literate Programming offers exactly a single narrative, and that narrative is tied to the definition of the code. Through Moldable Development we recognize that we always need multiple narratives, and that those narratives must be able to address any part of the system (not only static code).

And that's a sensible viewpoint. But I still see it as an advanced version of a literate programming, all done within an interactive environment.

The focus of Glamorous Toolkit seems to be on explaining a code base or a certain part of the system via presenting it via a custom tool.

But I am not too convinced with the top-level development model / workflow it assumes for you. I guess it's too narrowly-focused / opinionated.

It's also a custom fork of Pharo, so the question of long-term stability is even more unclear than that of Pharo itself.

I can't say I can compare it to Project Mage in any meaningful way, except it's also a live environment.

[1] https://gtoolkit.com/

Wow, that's very interesting, never heard of it before. In the first link and they've mentioned smalltalk and I remember checking out https://gtoolkit.com which I think has some of the ideas from emacs but is implemented in smalltalk. I always wondered if gtoolkit could fundamentally offer something emacs couldn't (at the principal level) but now that you've lebaled them together, I think I know the answer is no

prolly a bit outside the mainstream but -> https://gtoolkit.com/