Tudor Gîrba - Moldable development
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as the clearest pitch for programmable, malleable development environments, especially in threads on Smalltalk, Emacs and user-programmable systems.
What it is
Tudor Girba's Curry On! 2019 talk on moldable development, the idea that developers should build custom tools and views for each software system they work on. It draws on the Pharo and Glamorous Toolkit environments.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2022 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends trashburger · 2023-08 · on “Dart 3.1 and a retrospective on functional style programming in Dart”
I believe this to be an artifact of our current paradigm of software development, which is based purely around static "batch processing" where the software can't be molded easily. (I didn't want it to come off as a plug, so I didn't add it to my original message, but I'm working on something to solve that.) To get a better idea of what I think is the better approach, check out these talks: Tudor Gîrba - Moldable development - [this video] Jack Rusher - Stop Writing Dead Programs - [LINK]
Cites TuringTest · 2022-05 · on “Obsidian Dataview: Turn Obsidian Vault into a database you can query from”
Where has this tool been my whole life? :P Thanks for the link, I didn't know that one. Yes, this [this video] is the kind of programmable system I'm talking about, creating behavior on top of your stored content with methods specific to the particular collections of data already in your system, and ideally with minimal syntax for transferring data among the different tools.
Cites some-mthfka · 2023-01 · on “Emacs Is Not Enough”
Wrote a review on it on the website, copypasting : Glamorous Toolkit[1] promotes the idea of moldable development[2]. There's a talk on it: Tudor Gîrba - Moldable development.[3] The basic idea is to have multiple views and editors for any piece of data in your system (including code). Kind of interesting, but the toolkit looks and acts more like a fancy computational notebook type of environment, but without explicitly being a computational notebook. The site on moldable development states its difference with literate programming: They are similar in that they both promote the use of narratives for depicting systems. However, Literate Programming offers exactly a single narrative, and that
Cites kkfx · 2024-01 · on “Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)”
Do not take it as a judgment of your work, it's instead a broad observation using your work as a catalyzer to state it: I have much more integration with a much older app, it's name is Emacs, in my case it feature: - a Windows Manager, module named EXWM - a very powerful noting tool, org-mode - integrate to the note module there is file attachments, calendar, tasks, ... - a mail module, notmuch in my case, fully usable inside the note tool, so I can link a single message, a thread or a search query in a note, something simple as notmuch-search:tag:unread that open all my unread messages. - of course being a fully user programmable environment a mere link can execute code, meaning I have a cl