seagreen

What a great idea. I believe in this a trillion percent, due to the personal experience of watching myself and a stronger developer tackle similar problems at the same time. I relied on my brain and the standard tools of my system. He of course did the same, but also made a custom visualizer for the core of the algorithm. Night and day improvement!

So I'm a believer in the principles. But I'm also curious about throwaway743950's question. What are the things in the Glamorous Toolkit that concretely make it better for this style of programming than traditional tools? You say "[it] just happens to be a nice system of tools that make it easy to make more little tools", but that's got to be downplaying it. Switching environments is an agonizingly costly thing to do. What rewards await those who make the jump? Rubies? Emeralds? Custom views-with-nested-sub-custom-views? Curious (but not yet won over) readers want to know.

All credit to Conor White-Sullivan for making links cool again.

> unordinary direction

Hahaha, this is a very polite way to put that=) But I do appreciate it.

> I imagine the problem with that is that Obsidian by default stops dealing with Wikilinks inside fenced code

Exactly. Interestingly enough autocomplete is still triggered by [[ inside of a code block which is kind of funny. So writing code blocks works fine, it's just that they won't display with links.

> A different direction to explore might be to explore proportional font coding techniques that rely less on whitespace.

I'm definitely open to proportional font coding techniques being interesting, but in this case with all leading indentation unusable I doubt they'd be enough to get a normal experience. Unless you only write assembly so you can stick to the left margin <taps forehead>.

I had't seen it! The "clones" feature is cool, it sounds like they're way ahead in figuring out how to use transclusions effectively when coding.

Previously I'd thought of using transclusions for things like long-lived documentation. Now reading about Leo it seems like they'd be just as useful for creating short-term views into one's code. Eg start a refactor PR by transcluding all the relevant definitions into a doc. Now you can start writing PR comments in that doc before you even begin coding, and when you do all the relevant code is right there.

That's it. And the linearizer is only one way-- you write text with [[links]] and turn that into plaintext.

Of course! I should have just guessed they'd already have something like this.

We either need to port ALL of Glamorous Toolkit to mainstream langs or we need to convince all our employers to switch to Smalltalk. I am not certain which of those is possible or easier.

> I hope the author continues down this path and writes more about the experience.

I appreciate it=) I definitely want to write some more stuff up, in particular how code organization changes when you can tag and add attributes to definitions.

Hazel and Unison are two of the big ones. I'm friends with some of the Unison folks so I'm biased, but I really like how few features there are in the language. In general I'm just a huge sucker for subtractive improvement: if you can have a small number of awesome things (eg abilities) instead of a bunch of special case things (exception handling, monad trickery, dependency injection machinery) sign me up.

I know less about Hazel, my understanding is that it's source-code-in-CRDTs, which is definitely structured source code though may not technically be in a database.

> this is great! i’ve been thinking about exactly this (though styled after Logseq rather than Obsidian) but not gotten as far as implementing anything.

Thank you! I think [[links]] will work out of the box with Logseq since they're the same as Obsidian. Transclusions will be in the wrong format since Obsidian transclusions look like `![[this]]`, but it would be quick to modify the linearizer to handle them.

You may not want transclusions though since transcluding code into other code is... very weird. I'm curious what use cases people come up with for it though.

I love Smalltalk, and have done a reasonable amount of messing around with Cuis (which is awesome and everyone should try it).

However this gives you two things that Smalltalk doesn't:

1. It's language agnostic (boring I know)

2. It promotes keeping your code and written texts in the same system where they're both first class. That way they can link between each other, transclude each other, be published together, be organized the same way, etc. I really think this is the most interesting thing about the project, it really feels important to me.

Caveat: right now my written documents can link to/transclude code, but it doesn't work the other way yet. This is because the linearizer will see a link from code to documents as another definition and try to jam it in the source file. This would be an interesting use case for typed links, but Obsidian doesn't a have them AFAIK. Kind of cool since I haven't seen many other use cases for typed links in the wild.

EDIT: It occurs to me that I've never used a Smalltalk notetaking or word processing program. Are there any that are integrated with the System Browser, so that they can link to (or even better embed) code? If anyone has more info please let me know!

That video is wonderful. And thanks for all the other information as well, it's very helpful.