Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by WillAdams | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

WillAdams

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33267518

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23569799

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42987951

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23235120

It's something I've been considering for my current project:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

as I reach the limits of Literate Programming and so forth, but not convinced that the added overhead will pay off. Does anyone have a before-and-after of a project where this has been really useful? Bonus points if in Python.

View on HN

Thanks for the links :).

I'd be interested to learn more about the kinds of things you'd expect to get from using Glamorous Toolkit for gcodepreview.

The way I see it, one path would be to make the rendering happen directly in GT (perhaps through an external texture). This would then allow you to see the rendering as views in various Python objects.

I would hope this environment would facilitate programming by making it even easier to look up how a module/function was defined, and when developing code, to quickly/easily plot output graphically/interactively so as to see whether things are lining up or no.

I actually need a data visualization tool at my day job, so I've installed it there, and begun working through the documentation/tutorials --- hopefully it will facilitate my wrapping my mind around a better solution for a recursive description of systems at work _and_ making a graphical interactive version available to co-workers --- if that works out, I'll try it out on my personal project.

Great to hear!

I would be happy to learn more about the specific need you see in your work context. Either here or on our Discord.

If you are interested to learn more about kinds of problems and how it fits in the development environment, perhaps take a look at the book I am writing in the open with Simon Wardley (we recently released the first four chapters): https://medium.com/feenk/rewilding-software-engineering-900c...

I think this is most interestingly framed as an extension of/successor to/alternative for Literate Programming, or at least that's the mental cubbyhole it best fits in for me.

Another recent screed on programming in this vein is John Ousterhout's:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39996759-a-philosophy-of...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31248641

which similarly, walks up to, but doesn't quite come out in favour of Literate Programming.

EDIT: That said, it is framed as LP in at least one description: https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/smalltalk.html

Interesting. Let me offer you a different perspective.

Moldable Development is different from Literate Programming in at least two ways: - Literate Programming is focused on a single narrative. In contrast, a system can be seen in many ways. - Literate Programming has a fixed environment, and mixes text and code. In contrast, Moldable Development emphasizes the importance of the tool as an essential artifact through which to explain the system.

While Literate Programming does talk about explaining systems, I find it too limiting. Instead, we start from the observation that figuring systems out to know what to do next is the single most expensive activity in software engineering; thus it's more interesting to regard software engineering as a decision making activity about an ever changing system. This stands in contrast to the pervasive idea of software engineering as a construction activity. Optimizing for decision making leads to a new set of practices that are not an increment compared to what those typical used today.

Glamorous Toolkit looks odd exactly because we optimized for something else that others disregard.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com