g00z · HackerTrans

3개월 전discuss

These are a blast. I went through a phase in highschool where I exclusively played 90's CRPGs. There are some real gems that find a unique playstyle with tons of freedom due to how low fidelity the games are, while still being visually engaging and beautiful. Definitely check out fallout 2 if you haven't tried it yet, it's one of my favorites!

g00z

작년discuss

Simple views sure, but tools like the driller or debugger are great examples of what I'm trying to highlight about when I say having the views work over actual objects is really important.

Because if it wasn't for the fact the graphical stack was implemented as smalltalk objects, you couldn't build tools like the driller or debugger since they would have to be implemented as a secondary piece of software that loses the original context.

Like for example, I built a custom tool for myself when I was working on this p2p network and had a section of the codebase with some non obvious control flow, since it was handling multiple different p2p networks at the same time. Normally this is where you include a diagram in the docs, but in about an hour I built a custom code editor for the class, that visualized all the control flow and explained the cases in a flow diagram by simply introspecting on the methods defined in the class. And this tool never fell out of sync like a static diagram, since it wasn't hardcoded by me. And from that point on, I worked within this tool whenever hanlding anything related to this.

And fwiw, the python story is pretty seamless from my usage of it a few months ago. I was able to integrate and use python libraries into this project without much hassle.

g00z

작년discuss

The GT people don't like boxing what it is into any specific category. Which isn't great for new users but also makes sense when you use it.

Because it's really not any one thing other than an environment that is built from the ground up for building highly explainable systems, including itself. Think about it like a "meta-tool", or a tool for building tools. Similar to how an operating system is a piece of software used for writing other pieces of software easier.

So naturally this type of workflow lends itself to data analysis. However it's no less applicable in building p2p networks, or working with codebases in other languages.

Regarding sharing code, it's actually really straight forward. Your classes aren't stuck in images, but are normally stored as normal plaintext files and committed into git. The library story is arguable better than in most other languages, because of how flexible smalltalk is.

g00z

작년discuss

I would add one thing that makes GT very different from other tools and is very hard to recreate, is that these tools are ACTUAL objects and the things you see, are also ACTUAl objects, and not just a dummy representation of them as you see in other dataviz tools like plotting libraries or shell scripts.

This means your tools and visualizations are just a specific context-specific view of your objects. Meaning you aren't limited in how these tools can interact with said objects, because you are never working with static data, it's always with the actual objects.

It's hard to put into words, but it's similar to the difference between println debugging and a lisp repl or smalltalk debugger. They technically do the same thing but the actual implementation of them makes a world of difference.

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