Moldable Development is a way of programming through contextual tools. This is a case study showing how thousands of contextual tools can coexist in a unified development environment for a 35M lines of code system. These tools help developers handle many workflows seamlessly without leaving the environment.
Readit Newstudorgirba commented on Moldable Development at Lifeware (micro tools for a 35M LOC system) lepiter.io/feenk/moldable... · Posted by u/tudorgirba
Rather rigid thinking in your response(s), but I'm not surprised after this thread. I'd invite you to think more flexibly about what the interface to moldable development can be (note the lowercasing). AI is generally becoming the primary interface for all things, chat is just one medium, but definitely not the only one. It can/will be able to do all the same things that one could do in GT, plus a whole lot more.
I am glad that AI provides what you are looking for.
I'd still be interested if you have a specific point you disagree with in relation to what I wrote above and in particular, what we wrote in our little book (the link is above) specifically about the topic of this conversation.
The UI was particularly flexible and different data was visualised completely differently, that's all I immediately remember (it's been a while), but I don't remember being there being any limitation with data interactions ...
You have now given me enough reason to binge watch all at https://www.youtube.com/@gtoolkit :-)
Great! :)
Donald Knuth uses METAFONT/METAPOST as an on-the-fly calculator for math at need, including while working on programming problems.
I guess what I want is something like to:
- LyX --- where there is a focus on structure and tagging, and an ability to output a correctly typeset document
- pyspread --- where it is possible to work with data and calculations and arrive at results, including graphical ones (my current issue is that making a DXF and an SVG use different coordinate systems --- DXF is simpler, and uses the same one as for G-code, so that's what I use)
where it is possible to embed the spreadsheet cells/sheets dynamically as one used to use OLE to put a spreadsheet in a word document.
Sure. Those are technical details.
But ask yourself: how many things have been expressed this way? For example, what about security? Business domain documentation? Performance? Architecture? Discovering APIs? etc
It's not that the idea is not useful. It's that it's incomplete. We should not get stuck on it.
I think part of your challenge here is that the idea of system exploration kind of applies to almost everything a software engineer or data scientist does and while the demo material makes it clear that you can use Gtk for that kind of thing, its kind of hard to think specifically, at this moment, what one might use it for, because the problem space is so general and it seems like Gtk is maybe also very general, which means there is a little bit of work to apply it to a particular problem right out of the gate.
I find myself wanting to talk about this in more detail, but this account is anonymous - could I email you?
Please do feel free to email!
Or contact me on social media.
> The problem is that it talks about a fraction of what we want to convey.
That's ok! Hint at it and let people discover it instead of trying to force them from the get-go. Utilize progressive complexity; start simple, from first principles, and add complexity in bite-sized chunks. Show, don't tell.
No one wants to have to learn an entire philosophy before they can start using a tool.
For inspiration perhaps review how other very deep programs represent themselves for example orgmode.org. One caution there is that orgmode itself is famously obtuse for beginners.
Lastly, it is a bold statement to say something like "we have discovered a new development methodology, and have designed this toolkit around that philosophy".
Such a statement requires a ton of evidence that such a methodology is useful, and currently there simply is not enough.
Thanks for the suggestion.
orgmode is certainly interesting, but again, its goal is a (small) subset of what is achievable with GT :). And as you say, even that is hard for beginners.
> Lastly, it is a bold statement to say something like "we have discovered a new development methodology, and have designed this toolkit around that philosophy". Such a statement requires a ton of evidence that such a methodology is useful, and currently there simply is not enough.
I am well aware of what that statement says. I did not utter it in the first 10 years of this journey. But by now, I do believe we do have the evidence, and a good deal of it is even available publicly and freely. Of course, there is still this little issue of people actually taking the time to evaluate that evidence. If people are not going to look at the evidence, it's never going to be enough. And that's just fine because eventually, some people will look at it :).
GT and AI are direct competitors because both want to be the primary interface people use to develop through / with
AI is also moldable development
If you had to ask what AI tool usage is, then you have missed significant aspects of the shift
No, AI is not Moldable Development. AI can help Moldable Development (mostly as an optimization).
Moldable Development is first and foremost about the interface. AI is an engine. The interface is the thing you interact through. Like the chat. Or the editor with chat abilities. That little layer is worth paying attention to. Because it will define how you think about your interactions with AI.
I think these rapid feedback tools are great. And I love the idea of having tools show up in context. The only problem is that they seem to get unwieldy after a certain point. The view of all the different tools / libraries that come with it at the end of the presentation shows that. I have seen a few tools like this, and it seems like they would be more popular. Where you make changes in the code and you instantly see the effect. The ability to see diffs on data before and after looks very helpful.
I learned oop with Smalltalk so the syntax and feel aren't a problem.
I think code organization is the biggest weakness of the system. I like to zoom around a codebase in vi.
Very cool concepts though. Do you have a list of these types of development environments? I recall one that was demonstrated on a graphical output and another "next phase" that was working out keeping up with different database sources. I believe it was a different group, but I can't remember the name of that one.
Awesome work, and a field with massive potential. It's an environment that seems to work better than no-code and low-code environments.
Thanks for the feedback. And for the kind words.
>The only problem is that they seem to get unwieldy after a certain point. The view of all the different tools / libraries that come with it at the end of the presentation shows that.
That view at the end does not show that they get unwieldy at all. It shows that the contextual tools were needed everywhere. If the cost of tools is so low that you can amortize the cost of a tool on the first use, you can literally throw them away after that first use. In fact that's the fate of most tools. Those thousands of tools that you can see in a GT distribution are those that proved to be reusable. Many more were not :)
There were many tools that showed some visualization. But what we try to show with GT is that there exists a way to tackle arbitrary problems. This is possible because we see the environment itself as being a language made out of visual and interactive operators that can be combined in many ways.
Cool!
(I looked, but couldn't find that in the documentation)
Will keep working with and experimenting with it.
Consider joining us on Discord to look into more details :)