playground vs workspace

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playground vs workspace

Tudor Girba-2
Hi,

As you might see, the GTPlayground is called playground not workspace. The main reason for this is that workspace implies the place where work is done, and work is typically associated with creating code.

This is not the intention of the workspace.

Workspace also comes with a history that is associated with actual implementations. While the current GTPlayground might appear to be similar to the workspace, I think the way you can use the latter produces a significant shift.

Furthermore, I think the term playground is more inline with the idea of "playing with live objects". And, in the future, the implementation will likely evolve towards even more liveliness.

It is for this reason that I would prefer that the World menu item gets renamed to Playground.

What do you think?

Cheers,
Doru

--

"Every thing has its own flow"
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Re: playground vs workspace

HilaireFernandes
Le 08/12/2014 07:18, Tudor Girba a écrit :
> It is for this reason that I would prefer that the World menu item gets
> renamed to Playground.
>
> What do you think?
>

I agree with your POV

Hilaire

--
Dr. Geo - http://drgeo.eu
iStoa - http://istoa.drgeo.eu


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Re: playground vs workspace

philippeback
In reply to this post by Tudor Girba-2
This makes a lot of sense.

Having a plain workspace alongside would be perfect for me.

I am using Playground in my 3.0 (now having installed the new version with the nicer menus) and it works well. But this is definitely not what I use as a workspace.

One use case for a plain Workspace is when providing a kind of list of sample commands to customers to use on the image.

Like in: "Open this workspace contents, here are the typical commands for you to use".

Removing this ability and having a large thing popping at the right is really disturbing for these use cases.

Phil
 


On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 7:18 AM, Tudor Girba <[hidden email]> wrote:
Hi,

As you might see, the GTPlayground is called playground not workspace. The main reason for this is that workspace implies the place where work is done, and work is typically associated with creating code.

This is not the intention of the workspace.

Workspace also comes with a history that is associated with actual implementations. While the current GTPlayground might appear to be similar to the workspace, I think the way you can use the latter produces a significant shift.

Furthermore, I think the term playground is more inline with the idea of "playing with live objects". And, in the future, the implementation will likely evolve towards even more liveliness.

It is for this reason that I would prefer that the World menu item gets renamed to Playground.

What do you think?

Cheers,
Doru

--

"Every thing has its own flow"

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Re: playground vs workspace

kilon.alios
I disagree as I also disagree with the replacement of workspace and the inspector.

My opinion on this can be summarised as "Nothing should be added to Pharo without being fully documented" . 

The use of workspace and the inspector is well documented in PBE. There is no official documentation for GTPlayground and GTInspector. Sure those tools are not as powerful as the tools you guys have developed but they are production ready, well tested and fully documented. 

But I know of course that my opinion is not popular since pharoers care more about extending their environment than caring about newcomers or teaching people how to use Pharo. This is a trend that has dominated Pharo and it looks it will continue and takes Pharo a direction I definetly dont want to go. On the other hand Pharo is the only tool and language that does this at least compared to my experience. 

On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 10:47 AM, [hidden email] <[hidden email]> wrote:
This makes a lot of sense.

Having a plain workspace alongside would be perfect for me.

I am using Playground in my 3.0 (now having installed the new version with the nicer menus) and it works well. But this is definitely not what I use as a workspace.

One use case for a plain Workspace is when providing a kind of list of sample commands to customers to use on the image.

Like in: "Open this workspace contents, here are the typical commands for you to use".

Removing this ability and having a large thing popping at the right is really disturbing for these use cases.

Phil
 


On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 7:18 AM, Tudor Girba <[hidden email]> wrote:
Hi,

As you might see, the GTPlayground is called playground not workspace. The main reason for this is that workspace implies the place where work is done, and work is typically associated with creating code.

This is not the intention of the workspace.

Workspace also comes with a history that is associated with actual implementations. While the current GTPlayground might appear to be similar to the workspace, I think the way you can use the latter produces a significant shift.

Furthermore, I think the term playground is more inline with the idea of "playing with live objects". And, in the future, the implementation will likely evolve towards even more liveliness.

It is for this reason that I would prefer that the World menu item gets renamed to Playground.

What do you think?

Cheers,
Doru

--

"Every thing has its own flow"


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Re: playground vs workspace

philippeback


On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 10:27 AM, kilon alios <[hidden email]> wrote:
I disagree as I also disagree with the replacement of workspace and the inspector.

My opinion on this can be summarised as "Nothing should be added to Pharo without being fully documented" . 

The use of workspace and the inspector is well documented in PBE. There is no official documentation for GTPlayground and GTInspector. Sure those tools are not as powerful as the tools you guys have developed but they are production ready, well tested and fully documented. 

That's why I think we should keep the classic tools in the system.
I am going to train people for two days on how to use the application and people ask for reference works to read. I fall they see is different from the books, that's a problem indeed.
Phil

But I know of course that my opinion is not popular since pharoers care more about extending their environment than caring about newcomers or teaching people how to use Pharo. This is a trend that has dominated Pharo and it looks it will continue and takes Pharo a direction I definetly dont want to go. On the other hand Pharo is the only tool and language that does this at least compared to my experience. 

On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 10:47 AM, [hidden email] <[hidden email]> wrote:
This makes a lot of sense.

Having a plain workspace alongside would be perfect for me.

I am using Playground in my 3.0 (now having installed the new version with the nicer menus) and it works well. But this is definitely not what I use as a workspace.

One use case for a plain Workspace is when providing a kind of list of sample commands to customers to use on the image.

Like in: "Open this workspace contents, here are the typical commands for you to use".

Removing this ability and having a large thing popping at the right is really disturbing for these use cases.

Phil
 


On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 7:18 AM, Tudor Girba <[hidden email]> wrote:
Hi,

As you might see, the GTPlayground is called playground not workspace. The main reason for this is that workspace implies the place where work is done, and work is typically associated with creating code.

This is not the intention of the workspace.

Workspace also comes with a history that is associated with actual implementations. While the current GTPlayground might appear to be similar to the workspace, I think the way you can use the latter produces a significant shift.

Furthermore, I think the term playground is more inline with the idea of "playing with live objects". And, in the future, the implementation will likely evolve towards even more liveliness.

It is for this reason that I would prefer that the World menu item gets renamed to Playground.

What do you think?

Cheers,
Doru

--

"Every thing has its own flow"





--
---
Philippe Back
Visible Performance Improvements
Mob: +32(0) 478 650 140 | Fax: +32 (0) 70 408 027
Blog: http://philippeback.be | Twitter: @philippeback

High Octane SPRL
rue cour Boisacq 101 | 1301 Bierges | Belgium

Pharo Consortium Member - http://consortium.pharo.org/
Featured on the Software Process and Measurement Cast - http://spamcast.libsyn.com
Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect and Ability Engineering EADocX Value Added Reseller
 

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Re: playground vs workspace

Tudor Girba-2
In reply to this post by kilon.alios
Hi Kilon,

I agree with you in saying that we should have documentation.

But, those tools are already added. And they are documented on the humane-assessment.com blog, and this can serve as a strong basis for a more official documentation.

Please keep in mind that Pharo 4.0 is still under development, and things will still change until the release.

And, of course, we would welcome anyone willing to contribute with documentation.

Cheers,
Doru



On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 10:27 AM, kilon alios <[hidden email]> wrote:
I disagree as I also disagree with the replacement of workspace and the inspector.

My opinion on this can be summarised as "Nothing should be added to Pharo without being fully documented" . 

The use of workspace and the inspector is well documented in PBE. There is no official documentation for GTPlayground and GTInspector. Sure those tools are not as powerful as the tools you guys have developed but they are production ready, well tested and fully documented. 

But I know of course that my opinion is not popular since pharoers care more about extending their environment than caring about newcomers or teaching people how to use Pharo. This is a trend that has dominated Pharo and it looks it will continue and takes Pharo a direction I definetly dont want to go. On the other hand Pharo is the only tool and language that does this at least compared to my experience. 

On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 10:47 AM, [hidden email] <[hidden email]> wrote:
This makes a lot of sense.

Having a plain workspace alongside would be perfect for me.

I am using Playground in my 3.0 (now having installed the new version with the nicer menus) and it works well. But this is definitely not what I use as a workspace.

One use case for a plain Workspace is when providing a kind of list of sample commands to customers to use on the image.

Like in: "Open this workspace contents, here are the typical commands for you to use".

Removing this ability and having a large thing popping at the right is really disturbing for these use cases.

Phil
 


On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 7:18 AM, Tudor Girba <[hidden email]> wrote:
Hi,

As you might see, the GTPlayground is called playground not workspace. The main reason for this is that workspace implies the place where work is done, and work is typically associated with creating code.

This is not the intention of the workspace.

Workspace also comes with a history that is associated with actual implementations. While the current GTPlayground might appear to be similar to the workspace, I think the way you can use the latter produces a significant shift.

Furthermore, I think the term playground is more inline with the idea of "playing with live objects". And, in the future, the implementation will likely evolve towards even more liveliness.

It is for this reason that I would prefer that the World menu item gets renamed to Playground.

What do you think?

Cheers,
Doru

--

"Every thing has its own flow"





--

"Every thing has its own flow"
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Re: playground vs workspace

Torsten Bergmann
In reply to this post by philippeback
I would go the opposite direction and rename the "Playground" window to
"Workspace".

Several reasons:

   1. "Playground" reminds me too much on toyish things (and we had too much of this
      in the past already, thats why Pharo was forked). The windows intention is to be
      used for both: prototyping and serious stuff.  

   2. "Workspace" depicts the area where you usually work and this term is IMHO much much
      better suited. It is also a common concept known not only in Smalltalk but also
      other IDE's.

   3. I do not understand where the significant shift is (that justifies a new name) as
      we had similar tools already in the past. Basically it is a script space merged with
      an inspector, so more an evolution instead of a revolution.

      (This does not mean that I'm not happy that the GT tools are now in and provide
       such an easy to use extensibility!)

   3. There is a "Workspace open" but no "Playground open" possibility.

   4. Having two separate tools "Workspace" and "Playground" with nearly similar
      goals (write scripts and inspect objects) would be confusing for newbees.

Maybe we could set up a "community voting" somewhere.



Other things I would like to see:
=================================
  A. Change to "double clicking" behavior instead of "single clicking" when diving
     deeper into the iVars of objects.

     This would allow to use it as a normal inspector first without having
     directly more and more panes opening to the right.

     Anytime I start with a script in the initial code pane it is moving away
     when using "Do it and go" and clicking on my objects iVars in the right
     list view.
     
     With a "double click" the user could decide hisself if he just wants to select
     (single click to do any other menu item action) or dive deeper into the
     object (double click).


  B. Possibility to have splitters between the opened panes because sometimes the
     area is not wide enough.

  C. When several windows are open the "playgrounds" can not be distinguished by
     title in the world tool bar.
     
     Note that when I save a workspace contents the title of the workspace window
     is changed to the *.ws file.

  D. Change the initial tab name to something more meaninful (related to C).
     Or use a better timestamp representation as the current precision. As a human
     I do not distinguish up to milliseconds when opening such a window. Maybe up to
     seconds is enough.

     Using a tab is questionable by itself - we never have more than one on the
     initial code pane...

  E. Easily saving in the cloud is nice - but I would ask the user before sending
     it. This prevents wrong usage by accidentially clicking.

     Think of usage in a business scenario where you may work with confidential
     data that would otherwise be posted on the web...
 
     
Thanks
T.





 



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Re: playground vs workspace

kilon.alios
"But, those tools are already added. And they are documented on the humane-assessment.com blog, and this can serve as a strong basis for a more official documentation."

my issue is not "when" but "whether" . If you want to wait out the release of Pharo 4 to make official documentation, thats fine by me . I take late documentation over no documentation, any day.

The problem I see with Pharo and one factor I feel it may even lead to the demise of Pharo as a project is that we see new and very exciting sfuff added to Pharo like your tools, but the documentation part is lackaster to say the least. The real problem comes when the original author decides to abandon or not further develop his tools it becomes extremely difficult for new people to come in and contribute. The very fact that now we replace the old workspace with a new tool is the testament to this problem. I think the situation would be dramatically different if Worskpace was fully documented, both at the user level and developer level. Its afterall an extremely important tool for Pharo. If that was the case we would have seen a natural evolution of workspace which would have made Playground far less needed. 

So its not that I disagree just with you I disagree with the general management of Pharo that follows the mentality "let the new features in and we worry about the documentation later on".  No , no and NO!

 I was recently asked by a newcomer to Pharo being a python developer himself whether he should invest in Pharo . He wanted my opinion because I have experience both in python and pharo . I was not suprised to find out that he struggled with the documentation and he was really reluctant to give Pharo a serious try. He loved the features and all that but his learning was a much bigger pain than his experience with python and other programming languages. I ended up recommending him to ask more question here in the mailing list and he replied he did not feel comfortable asking question that for him were "stupid". Can I blame him ? Of course not. He was not aware of many of the blog posts and other source of documentation that are not "official".

Dont know who that person is and how important as a member would become for the Pharo community but I can clearly see his problems being common to anyone or almost anyone introduced to Pharo unless that person comes already with a Smalltalk background.

What I do know is Pharo needs new people to come in and take it further and in order to do that we need to build a Pharo that is as inviting to newcomers as our abilities permits us to. Putting documentation as a second priority is a recipe to disaster. 







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Re: playground vs workspace

philippeback


Le 8 déc. 2014 13:57, "kilon alios" <[hidden email]> a écrit :
>
> "But, those tools are already added. And they are documented on the humane-assessment.com blog, and this can serve as a strong basis for a more official documentation."
>
> my issue is not "when" but "whether" . If you want to wait out the release of Pharo 4 to make official documentation, thats fine by me . I take late documentation over no documentation, any day.
>
> The problem I see with Pharo and one factor I feel it may even lead to the demise of Pharo as a project is that we see new and very exciting sfuff added to Pharo like your tools, but the documentation part is lackaster to say the least. The real problem comes when the original author decides to abandon or not further develop his tools it becomes extremely difficult for new people to come in and contribute. The very fact that now we replace the old workspace with a new tool is the testament to this problem. I think the situation would be dramatically different if Worskpace was fully documented, both at the user level and developer level. Its afterall an extremely important tool for Pharo. If that was the case we would have seen a natural evolution of workspace which would have made Playground far less needed. 
>
> So its not that I disagree just with you I disagree with the general management of Pharo that follows the mentality "let the new features in and we worry about the documentation later on".  No , no and NO!
>
>  I was recently asked by a newcomer to Pharo being a python developer himself whether he should invest in Pharo . He wanted my opinion because I have experience both in python and pharo . I was not suprised to find out that he struggled with the documentation and he was really reluctant to give Pharo a serious try. He loved the features and all that but his learning was a much bigger pain than his experience with python and other programming languages. I ended up recommending him to ask more question here in the mailing list and he replied he did not feel comfortable asking question that for him were "stupid". Can I blame him ? Of course not. He was not aware of many of the blog posts and other source of documentation that are not "official".

Smalltalk vas always been a self selecting tool. Pharo is like that.

The bluebook is great to learn a lot.

As are a lot of free books.

But ppl do not read them it seems...

Now tell me a lot of R and Node packages are well documented... Argh. No. They happen to have a lot of Q&A on SO.

Phik

>
> Dont know who that person is and how important as a member would become for the Pharo community but I can clearly see his problems being common to anyone or almost anyone introduced to Pharo unless that person comes already with a Smalltalk background.
>
> What I do know is Pharo needs new people to come in and take it further and in order to do that we need to build a Pharo that is as inviting to newcomers as our abilities permits us to. Putting documentation as a second priority is a recipe to disaster. 
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

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Re: playground vs workspace

abergel
In reply to this post by Tudor Girba-2
This is amazing to see such many different opinions. For me, I would keep it innovative and breaking with its legacy. Playground for all! No more workspaces! And yeah, we will have to write new book about that. We are already working on this!

Cheers,
Alexandre


> On Dec 8, 2014, at 3:18 AM, Tudor Girba <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> As you might see, the GTPlayground is called playground not workspace. The main reason for this is that workspace implies the place where work is done, and work is typically associated with creating code.
>
> This is not the intention of the workspace.
>
> Workspace also comes with a history that is associated with actual implementations. While the current GTPlayground might appear to be similar to the workspace, I think the way you can use the latter produces a significant shift.
>
> Furthermore, I think the term playground is more inline with the idea of "playing with live objects". And, in the future, the implementation will likely evolve towards even more liveliness.
>
> It is for this reason that I would prefer that the World menu item gets renamed to Playground.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Cheers,
> Doru
>
> --
> www.tudorgirba.com
>
> "Every thing has its own flow"

--
_,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:
Alexandre Bergel  http://www.bergel.eu
^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;.




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Re: playground vs workspace

Tudor Girba-2
In reply to this post by kilon.alios
Hi Kilon,

Please, let's get positive :).

I really do not see how your remarks apply to the current situation. We put quite some effort in documenting GT tools through posts on the humane assessment blog (in the meantime, the page should be more reliable - I hope) and through examples in the image. We took specific care exactly in providing examples so that people can have something to guide themselves by.

In fact, we did not release until we had those examples. Just look at the announcement of Spotter and you will see that it has a significant usage documentation.

If it's not enough or not in the right place, you have to get specific and we can address those problems, but you cannot say that there is no documentation because that is simply not true. I think we have enough material to create a couple of chapters in a Pharo book, or even a book on its own, and I think it is reasonable to assume that given that the material is available we can find the rest of the effort to produce the "official" documentation.

Cheers,
Doru



On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 1:56 PM, kilon alios <[hidden email]> wrote:
"But, those tools are already added. And they are documented on the humane-assessment.com blog, and this can serve as a strong basis for a more official documentation."

my issue is not "when" but "whether" . If you want to wait out the release of Pharo 4 to make official documentation, thats fine by me . I take late documentation over no documentation, any day.

The problem I see with Pharo and one factor I feel it may even lead to the demise of Pharo as a project is that we see new and very exciting sfuff added to Pharo like your tools, but the documentation part is lackaster to say the least. The real problem comes when the original author decides to abandon or not further develop his tools it becomes extremely difficult for new people to come in and contribute. The very fact that now we replace the old workspace with a new tool is the testament to this problem. I think the situation would be dramatically different if Worskpace was fully documented, both at the user level and developer level. Its afterall an extremely important tool for Pharo. If that was the case we would have seen a natural evolution of workspace which would have made Playground far less needed. 

So its not that I disagree just with you I disagree with the general management of Pharo that follows the mentality "let the new features in and we worry about the documentation later on".  No , no and NO!

 I was recently asked by a newcomer to Pharo being a python developer himself whether he should invest in Pharo . He wanted my opinion because I have experience both in python and pharo . I was not suprised to find out that he struggled with the documentation and he was really reluctant to give Pharo a serious try. He loved the features and all that but his learning was a much bigger pain than his experience with python and other programming languages. I ended up recommending him to ask more question here in the mailing list and he replied he did not feel comfortable asking question that for him were "stupid". Can I blame him ? Of course not. He was not aware of many of the blog posts and other source of documentation that are not "official".

Dont know who that person is and how important as a member would become for the Pharo community but I can clearly see his problems being common to anyone or almost anyone introduced to Pharo unless that person comes already with a Smalltalk background.

What I do know is Pharo needs new people to come in and take it further and in order to do that we need to build a Pharo that is as inviting to newcomers as our abilities permits us to. Putting documentation as a second priority is a recipe to disaster. 










--

"Every thing has its own flow"
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Re: playground vs workspace

EstebanLM
In reply to this post by Torsten Bergmann
Ok… several things :)

First, I want to say that in this special case I tend to be in agreement with Torsten. Because I also see playground as an evolution of the good old workspace. Also, most documentation still refers to that area as “workspace” and not “playground”… and honestly I still do not understand why is *fundamentally* different. Inspectors are also really different and nevertheless we are still calling them inspectors… I suppose we can do the same with playground/workspace.

Second, while I understand people tend to react conservative to changes, please guys understand that to keep tools inside image forever just does not scales and then requirements like “ok for adding, but please let the old tools too” can not be a path to follow. Of course we are not going to remove immediately, but certainly during next cycle one of both will fade away.
It has to be like that because to maintain everything forever requires exponential resources… and we cannot do that.

Third, documentation is important but hard to produce in a reliable way. Also, documentation style in pharo (or any smalltalk) is fundamentally different than documentation in other systems. We have a system and a culture that empowers system exploration and that is the way we need to improve things: more examples *in system* is better than written documentation (and we have several books now of written documentation, is just that some of them is outdated).
And yes, we still need to improve a  lot in that area… but we are not in zero, quite the opposite… anyway, we will never have the kind of documentation that other system has…

Finally, fourth… we as a community has this tendency of start talking of A and end talking of Z. Like this thread… this was a question about the name of a tool. Not a discussion about lack of documentation or a feedback thread. All concerns are super valid, but talking about them in the incorrect place are causing me (and I think several others) to miss the importance of all things. So: documentation is another thread, and feedback is another thread. I agree with both of you, but if you put it here it will be lost because they become invisible,

cheers,
Esteban


> On 08 Dec 2014, at 10:55, Torsten Bergmann <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> I would go the opposite direction and rename the "Playground" window to
> "Workspace".
>
> Several reasons:
>
>   1. "Playground" reminds me too much on toyish things (and we had too much of this
>      in the past already, thats why Pharo was forked). The windows intention is to be
>      used for both: prototyping and serious stuff.  
>
>   2. "Workspace" depicts the area where you usually work and this term is IMHO much much
>      better suited. It is also a common concept known not only in Smalltalk but also
>      other IDE's.
>
>   3. I do not understand where the significant shift is (that justifies a new name) as
>      we had similar tools already in the past. Basically it is a script space merged with
>      an inspector, so more an evolution instead of a revolution.
>
>      (This does not mean that I'm not happy that the GT tools are now in and provide
>       such an easy to use extensibility!)
>
>   3. There is a "Workspace open" but no "Playground open" possibility.
>
>   4. Having two separate tools "Workspace" and "Playground" with nearly similar
>      goals (write scripts and inspect objects) would be confusing for newbees.
>
> Maybe we could set up a "community voting" somewhere.
>
>
>
> Other things I would like to see:
> =================================
>  A. Change to "double clicking" behavior instead of "single clicking" when diving
>     deeper into the iVars of objects.
>
>     This would allow to use it as a normal inspector first without having
>     directly more and more panes opening to the right.
>
>     Anytime I start with a script in the initial code pane it is moving away
>     when using "Do it and go" and clicking on my objects iVars in the right
>     list view.
>
>     With a "double click" the user could decide hisself if he just wants to select
>     (single click to do any other menu item action) or dive deeper into the
>     object (double click).
>
>
>  B. Possibility to have splitters between the opened panes because sometimes the
>     area is not wide enough.
>
>  C. When several windows are open the "playgrounds" can not be distinguished by
>     title in the world tool bar.
>
>     Note that when I save a workspace contents the title of the workspace window
>     is changed to the *.ws file.
>
>  D. Change the initial tab name to something more meaninful (related to C).
>     Or use a better timestamp representation as the current precision. As a human
>     I do not distinguish up to milliseconds when opening such a window. Maybe up to
>     seconds is enough.
>
>     Using a tab is questionable by itself - we never have more than one on the
>     initial code pane...
>
>  E. Easily saving in the cloud is nice - but I would ask the user before sending
>     it. This prevents wrong usage by accidentially clicking.
>
>     Think of usage in a business scenario where you may work with confidential
>     data that would otherwise be posted on the web...
>
>
> Thanks
> T.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>


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Re: playground vs workspace

Sven Van Caekenberghe-2
In reply to this post by kilon.alios
More documentation is always better, but you can hardly accuse Doru from trying, he is making an excellent effort in explaining what he does and why, this is a lot of work, and I appreciate it very much. Note that he is also trying to convince others of alternative/new/experimental ideas, which is even harder.

And apart from that, he (and his team) are not just talking, they write actual working code and make it available. Of course they get all sorts of feedback, that is why they do it, but please, please consider the amount of work and determination it costs to make all this real/useable and not just vapourware !

I have the utmost respect for what they are doing and how they are doing it.

You (and other users) have a choice: you can keep using Pharo 3 and the tools there instead of going along with the development branch. Pharo 3 is meant for stable production use, it matches most of the current publications.

There is [hidden email] for normal beginner discussions, most users should ask questions there, not the other way around as it is today. I read both and try to help anyone the best I can.

Sven

> On 08 Dec 2014, at 13:56, kilon alios <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> "But, those tools are already added. And they are documented on the humane-assessment.com blog, and this can serve as a strong basis for a more official documentation."
>
> my issue is not "when" but "whether" . If you want to wait out the release of Pharo 4 to make official documentation, thats fine by me . I take late documentation over no documentation, any day.
>
> The problem I see with Pharo and one factor I feel it may even lead to the demise of Pharo as a project is that we see new and very exciting sfuff added to Pharo like your tools, but the documentation part is lackaster to say the least. The real problem comes when the original author decides to abandon or not further develop his tools it becomes extremely difficult for new people to come in and contribute. The very fact that now we replace the old workspace with a new tool is the testament to this problem. I think the situation would be dramatically different if Worskpace was fully documented, both at the user level and developer level. Its afterall an extremely important tool for Pharo. If that was the case we would have seen a natural evolution of workspace which would have made Playground far less needed.
>
> So its not that I disagree just with you I disagree with the general management of Pharo that follows the mentality "let the new features in and we worry about the documentation later on".  No , no and NO!
>
>  I was recently asked by a newcomer to Pharo being a python developer himself whether he should invest in Pharo . He wanted my opinion because I have experience both in python and pharo . I was not suprised to find out that he struggled with the documentation and he was really reluctant to give Pharo a serious try. He loved the features and all that but his learning was a much bigger pain than his experience with python and other programming languages. I ended up recommending him to ask more question here in the mailing list and he replied he did not feel comfortable asking question that for him were "stupid". Can I blame him ? Of course not. He was not aware of many of the blog posts and other source of documentation that are not "official".
>
> Dont know who that person is and how important as a member would become for the Pharo community but I can clearly see his problems being common to anyone or almost anyone introduced to Pharo unless that person comes already with a Smalltalk background.
>
> What I do know is Pharo needs new people to come in and take it further and in order to do that we need to build a Pharo that is as inviting to newcomers as our abilities permits us to. Putting documentation as a second priority is a recipe to disaster.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>


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Re: playground vs workspace

abergel
In reply to this post by EstebanLM
I do not completely buy the documentation argument. It is not a big deal saying when you read “Workspace” in a book, it is actually “Playground”. People even figure this out alone. The code browser mentioned in Pharo by example is fairly different from the one we have currently. It even has a different name! But people can sort this out very quickly.

Let’s move on, without caring much about old books. New books are being written and more will come. Let’s focus on making the system better!

Cheers,
Alexandre



> On Dec 8, 2014, at 10:29 AM, Esteban Lorenzano <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> First, I want to say that in this special case I tend to be in agreement with Torsten. Because I also see playground as an evolution of the good old workspace. Also, most documentation still refers to that area as “workspace” and not “playground”… and honestly I still do not understand why is *fundamentally* different. Inspectors are also really different and nevertheless we are still calling them inspectors… I suppose we can do the same with playground/workspace.

--
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Re: playground vs workspace

stepharo
In reply to this post by Tudor Girba-2
Hi doru

I would like to have playground be named playground and that we keep "workspace" but I would like to change the name to "SimpleNoteEditor".
I do not like the idea that we are all forced to use one single tools. We are adults.

Stef

Hi,

As you might see, the GTPlayground is called playground not workspace. The main reason for this is that workspace implies the place where work is done, and work is typically associated with creating code.

This is not the intention of the workspace.

Workspace also comes with a history that is associated with actual implementations. While the current GTPlayground might appear to be similar to the workspace, I think the way you can use the latter produces a significant shift.

Furthermore, I think the term playground is more inline with the idea of "playing with live objects". And, in the future, the implementation will likely evolve towards even more liveliness.

It is for this reason that I would prefer that the World menu item gets renamed to Playground.

What do you think?

Cheers,
Doru

--

"Every thing has its own flow"

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Re: playground vs workspace

stepharo
In reply to this post by Sven Van Caekenberghe-2
+1
And there is plenty of blog post to turn them into chapters.
If everything we produce would have this documentation quality I would
not be worried.

Le 8/12/14 05:33, Sven Van Caekenberghe a écrit :

> More documentation is always better, but you can hardly accuse Doru from trying, he is making an excellent effort in explaining what he does and why, this is a lot of work, and I appreciate it very much. Note that he is also trying to convince others of alternative/new/experimental ideas, which is even harder.
>
> And apart from that, he (and his team) are not just talking, they write actual working code and make it available. Of course they get all sorts of feedback, that is why they do it, but please, please consider the amount of work and determination it costs to make all this real/useable and not just vapourware !
>
> I have the utmost respect for what they are doing and how they are doing it.
>
> You (and other users) have a choice: you can keep using Pharo 3 and the tools there instead of going along with the development branch. Pharo 3 is meant for stable production use, it matches most of the current publications.
>
> There is [hidden email] for normal beginner discussions, most users should ask questions there, not the other way around as it is today. I read both and try to help anyone the best I can.
>
> Sven
>
>> On 08 Dec 2014, at 13:56, kilon alios <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> "But, those tools are already added. And they are documented on the humane-assessment.com blog, and this can serve as a strong basis for a more official documentation."
>>
>> my issue is not "when" but "whether" . If you want to wait out the release of Pharo 4 to make official documentation, thats fine by me . I take late documentation over no documentation, any day.
>>
>> The problem I see with Pharo and one factor I feel it may even lead to the demise of Pharo as a project is that we see new and very exciting sfuff added to Pharo like your tools, but the documentation part is lackaster to say the least. The real problem comes when the original author decides to abandon or not further develop his tools it becomes extremely difficult for new people to come in and contribute. The very fact that now we replace the old workspace with a new tool is the testament to this problem. I think the situation would be dramatically different if Worskpace was fully documented, both at the user level and developer level. Its afterall an extremely important tool for Pharo. If that was the case we would have seen a natural evolution of workspace which would have made Playground far less needed.
>>
>> So its not that I disagree just with you I disagree with the general management of Pharo that follows the mentality "let the new features in and we worry about the documentation later on".  No , no and NO!
>>
>>   I was recently asked by a newcomer to Pharo being a python developer himself whether he should invest in Pharo . He wanted my opinion because I have experience both in python and pharo . I was not suprised to find out that he struggled with the documentation and he was really reluctant to give Pharo a serious try. He loved the features and all that but his learning was a much bigger pain than his experience with python and other programming languages. I ended up recommending him to ask more question here in the mailing list and he replied he did not feel comfortable asking question that for him were "stupid". Can I blame him ? Of course not. He was not aware of many of the blog posts and other source of documentation that are not "official".
>>
>> Dont know who that person is and how important as a member would become for the Pharo community but I can clearly see his problems being common to anyone or almost anyone introduced to Pharo unless that person comes already with a Smalltalk background.
>>
>> What I do know is Pharo needs new people to come in and take it further and in order to do that we need to build a Pharo that is as inviting to newcomers as our abilities permits us to. Putting documentation as a second priority is a recipe to disaster.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>


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Re: playground vs workspace

stepharo
In reply to this post by stepharo

Le 8/12/14 05:43, stepharo a écrit :
Hi doru

I would like to have playground be named playground and that we keep "workspace" but I would like to change the name to "SimpleNoteEditor".
Why because this is always good to have simple tools to read from? (I'm not talking about the current workspace implementation but the new one).
I would like even try to learn something from Playground implementation because the tools is more advanced while I'm not afraid to learn
from a simple tool.

I do not like the idea that we are all forced to use one single tools. We are adults.

Stef

Hi,

As you might see, the GTPlayground is called playground not workspace. The main reason for this is that workspace implies the place where work is done, and work is typically associated with creating code.

This is not the intention of the workspace.

Workspace also comes with a history that is associated with actual implementations. While the current GTPlayground might appear to be similar to the workspace, I think the way you can use the latter produces a significant shift.

Furthermore, I think the term playground is more inline with the idea of "playing with live objects". And, in the future, the implementation will likely evolve towards even more liveliness.

It is for this reason that I would prefer that the World menu item gets renamed to Playground.

What do you think?

Cheers,
Doru

--

"Every thing has its own flow"


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Re: playground vs workspace

Tudor Girba-2
In reply to this post by Torsten Bergmann
Hi,

This was a long mail :). I tried to address your points below.


On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 10:55 AM, Torsten Bergmann <[hidden email]> wrote:
I would go the opposite direction and rename the "Playground" window to
"Workspace".

Several reasons:

   1. "Playground" reminds me too much on toyish things (and we had too much of this
      in the past already, thats why Pharo was forked). The windows intention is to be
      used for both: prototyping and serious stuff.

Yes, I agree that it is where work can happen. But, it is not the only place where work happens: the debugger or the code is also where work happens :). This is why I find the workspace term misleading. And Playground would match so well the marketing term of "playing with live objects". You might say that Playground is not the only place where people can play with objects, but 


   2. "Workspace" depicts the area where you usually work and this term is IMHO much much
      better suited. It is also a common concept known not only in Smalltalk but also
      other IDE's.

Not all. Swift calls it Playground (yes, they copied us ;))


   3. I do not understand where the significant shift is (that justifies a new name) as
      we had similar tools already in the past. Basically it is a script space merged with
      an inspector, so more an evolution instead of a revolution.

      (This does not mean that I'm not happy that the GT tools are now in and provide
       such an easy to use extensibility!)

You are looking at it from a technical point of view. Yes, it's just a merge of two features, but it is the end experience that is so much different. That is why I think we have conceptually a different solution than we ever had.

 
   3. There is a "Workspace open" but no "Playground open" possibility.

I think I do not get this point. What do you mean?

 
   4. Having two separate tools "Workspace" and "Playground" with nearly similar
      goals (write scripts and inspect objects) would be confusing for newbees.

Maybe we could set up a "community voting" somewhere.

Perhaps.
 

Other things I would like to see:
=================================
  A. Change to "double clicking" behavior instead of "single clicking" when diving
     deeper into the iVars of objects.

     This would allow to use it as a normal inspector first without having
     directly more and more panes opening to the right.

     Anytime I start with a script in the initial code pane it is moving away
     when using "Do it and go" and clicking on my objects iVars in the right
     list view.

     With a "double click" the user could decide hisself if he just wants to select
     (single click to do any other menu item action) or dive deeper into the
     object (double click).

The double click is not a good solution because it would interfere with several use cases. One of them is the ability to go through a list and see the preview to the right. If you would have to double-click or press Enter to get the preview, it would be too hard. I am considering though to allow a pseudo-mode and trigger the selection only when Cmd is pressed, but that is tricky because it can conflict with multiple selections. Another thing we consider is to freeze the first pane. This will likely solve most problems.


  B. Possibility to have splitters between the opened panes because sometimes the
     area is not wide enough.

This is hard to do because having full panes visible at all times (no possibility of seeing half of a pane) is more important. I do not have a solution to marry both of these concerns.

 
  C. When several windows are open the "playgrounds" can not be distinguished by
     title in the world tool bar.

     Note that when I save a workspace contents the title of the workspace window
     is changed to the *.ws file.

Point taken. This is an area of work that is not finished yet.
 
  D. Change the initial tab name to something more meaninful (related to C).
     Or use a better timestamp representation as the current precision. As a human
     I do not distinguish up to milliseconds when opening such a window. Maybe up to
     seconds is enough.

     Using a tab is questionable by itself - we never have more than one on the
     initial code pane...

This is indeed another area that is not yet quite finished. The time stamp shows the actual name of the file from the play-cache folder. It is not about precision. It is about uniqueness. We could imagine a different scheme that provide a counter, but I do not think this would be any better. We have a "tab" because I would like to get to having multiple playgrounds in the same window. Likely, we should end up being able to change the name of that playground and this will transparently map to a file that will be placed in another dedicated folder (I think of calling it play-stash). At that moment, having the technical label as it is now will be useful to easily distinguish between explicitly labelled and unlabelled playground pages. But, this part clearly needs more work.
 
  E. Easily saving in the cloud is nice - but I would ask the user before sending
     it. This prevents wrong usage by accidentially clicking.

     Think of usage in a business scenario where you may work with confidential
     data that would otherwise be posted on the web...

Good point! Can you add a bug issue for this?

Cheers,
Doru

 

Thanks
T.












--

"Every thing has its own flow"
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Re: playground vs workspace

Nicolai Hess
In reply to this post by Tudor Girba-2
Hi Doru,

I do not understand exactly what the difference is or why you wouldn't call GTPlayground  " a Workspace".

As I think
you are using GTPlayground  very extensively:
Do YOU use the Workspace at all ?
Do YOU miss something in GTPlayground, where you would say: "Yes, only a workspace should do this".


Nicolai


2014-12-08 7:18 GMT+01:00 Tudor Girba <[hidden email]>:
Hi,

As you might see, the GTPlayground is called playground not workspace. The main reason for this is that workspace implies the place where work is done, and work is typically associated with creating code.

This is not the intention of the workspace.

Workspace also comes with a history that is associated with actual implementations. While the current GTPlayground might appear to be similar to the workspace, I think the way you can use the latter produces a significant shift.

Furthermore, I think the term playground is more inline with the idea of "playing with live objects". And, in the future, the implementation will likely evolve towards even more liveliness.

It is for this reason that I would prefer that the World menu item gets renamed to Playground.

What do you think?

Cheers,
Doru

--

"Every thing has its own flow"

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Re: playground vs workspace

kilon.alios
In reply to this post by stepharo
"Hi Kilon,

Please, let's get positive :)."

I dont believe in being positive or negative can help. I think being open minded and seeing and exploring problems is far more reliable way to improve. I also believe that reporting a real problem is far more beneficial to a community than hiding it away. 

"If it's not enough or not in the right place, you have to get specific and we can address those problems, but you cannot say that there is no documentation because that is simply not true."

I never said there is no documentation about the GT tools, I said there is no official documentation, no chapter on PBE or Pharo for the Enterprise. 

"Finally, fourth… we as a community has this tendency of start talking of A and end talking of Z. "

Lets talk about me, I have fully answered the question and I was never offtopic. The question was should Playground renamed to workspace, my answer was no . why ? because there is no official documentation about it and it should not be in the Pharo 4 image even if that is an unstable WIP image. If that is not an ontopic answer then I have no clue what it is. 

In any case I can clearly see there is a vast gap between how I think coding should be done and what people contributing to Pharo think. Obviously community is about democracy or should be and if people think that Pharo goes toward a very good direction I have no issue with that, we all make our choices and have our own opinions.
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