Comment by 16bytes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 16bytes | Hacker News Reader

I also have little idea what this project does or wants to do. Let's just talk about the homepage, especially the above-the-fold portion.

> "Glamorous Toolkit is the Moldable Development Environment"

So it's some sort of an IDE? What does moldable mean?

> "Make systems explainable through contextual micro tools"

What is a "system" in the context of an IDE? "Contextual micro tools" also sounds completely abstract.

> "Each problem about your system is special. And each problem can be explained through contextual development experiences. Glamorous Toolkit enables you to build such experiences out of micro tools. Thousands of them ... per system. It's called Moldable Development."

... this does not help at all. Just more words without meaning.

Next, there's the video. For somebody with zero context so far, why would they sit through a 46 min low quality video?

tudorgirba - if this is your project, you really need to focus on getting the top half of the page right. People won't watch your video, no one will read your book if you can't give them a hook they understand.

Use words and phrases with concrete and well understood meaning with adjectives:

  * Don't say "micro tool".  Like Posix utilities?  What is a tool? What makes it micro?
  * Don't say "contextual development".  Isn't all development contextual?
  * "moldable" - no one knows what this means, don't force them to try and figure it out.
  * Don't say "system", it is too abstract.

For example, "Glamorous Toolkit is an IDE for literate programming with first class support for interactive visualizations". If you can't get that sentence right, people just won't invest in learning more about your platform.

Thanks for taking the time to provide this detailed feedback!

I agree that the message is not yet clear for most. We can see it in these threads quite well. Now, this is not the first one we are trying, and we will continue to try further :).

The sentence you provide is certainly interesting because it is relatable. The problem is that it talks about a fraction of what we want to convey.

At this point in time, as we do not know how to convey the idea succinctly, we are looking for people that will take the time to look at the more elaborate explanations. It turns out that there exist such people. It seems to me that you might be inclined to look at it, too.

Please do let me know if you do. I would offer to show you around. And who knows, perhaps you can contribute a better presentation for what this is. What do you think?

> 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 :).

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