Thread by @girba

Last year we shipped a first version of #Lepiter and it felt great to see it flying out the door:

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/1405241195887050758

Lepiter is the latest significant step in our journey to making systems explainable. Here is a behind the scene peak of how we got here.

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Our guiding north star @feenkcom is making the inside of systems explainable. We spent a great deal of energy rethinking how we can figure systems out, and this led to #MoldableDevelopment and #GToolkit.

https://twitter.com/girba/status/1352734434613727232?s=20

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#GToolkit proposes a new development experience. We see the environment as a language made out of visual and interactive operators that can be combined in many ways while working with the environment.

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Early on, we embraced the idea that narratives are central to software development:

https://twitter.com/girba/status/1357446644577542145?s=20

Documenter and Playground were two components of #GToolkit that facilitated the creation and consumption of such narratives.

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The Playground was made of snippets and was where we would start to prototype or explore:

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/1032745159186886656?s=20

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Combined with custom inspector views changes it could be used for playing with interfaces ...

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/1168908843578998784?s=20

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... for doing analyses of external systems ...

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/1242934204431773697?s=20

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... or for querying the code of #GToolkit itself.

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/1085649744712556545?s=20

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At the same time, Documenter was another component that complemented the Playground with live textual narratives and that transformed the #GToolkit image into a wiki made out of class comments and markup files:

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/1047235226160775170?s=20

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Documenter was particularly interesting in combination with examples (tests that return objects). When embedding custom inspector views of examples in documents, we essentially use the testing effort to produce live and testable documentation.

https://twitter.com/Chis_Andrei/status/1237678278711836673?s=20

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#Lepiter unifies what Playground and Documenter had to offer and adds more abilities and it enriches the environment's language in significant and unexpected ways.

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/1405241195887050758?s=20

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If until now #GToolkit might have been considered as an environment for #Pharo, we can now show how the same principles and design apply well beyond Pharo and even beyond programming.

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Consider this example: we write a custom visualization that highlights a query over the current knowledge base, and when clicking on the result we get to continue editing.

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/1405241793751441427?s=20

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Interestingly, the size of Lepiter's implementation is comparable to that of Playground and Documenter, but it's so much more powerful. That's what we mean by a language. Lepiter is not a feature. It's a new operator that is combinable with the rest of the environment.

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With the addition of Lepiter we get an environment in which we can treat programming, data science and note taking in the same way. The possibilties that are opened from this unification are simply exciting.

https://twitter.com/girba/status/1465822051378384906?s=20

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After a year of working with Lepiter we can now safely say that it has transformed how we program, how we learn, how we document, how we communicate both on the technical level and on the business level.

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Newcomers to #GToolkit often tell us that it's unclear what the environment is. Some see a notebook. Some see a programming environment. Some see code analyses. Some see a graphical engine. And now, some people see a note taking tool.

So, which one is it? Neither and all.

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#GToolkit is first and foremost our exploration of how to make systems explainable by doing away with artificial boundaries in the environment.

https://twitter.com/girba/status/1381855966535225344?s=20

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#GToolkit is also a free and open-source product that we use on a regular basis to address hard real world problems.

https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/1455683068862345223?s=20

You can use it, too.

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While #GToolkit can appear advanced by today's standards, it's merely the beginning of the conversation. If you like what we build, connect with us. Let's enrich the conversation.

https://twitter.com/girba/status/1352763568379359240?s=20

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