2014-12-26 13:18 GMT+01:00 Tudor Girba <tudor@tudorgirba.com>:
Hi,
I think there must be a misunderstanding.
There can be a good reason for having a basic inspector around, but I think the reason is not because people cannot choose what to use.
There is a toggle to enable/disable the GTInspector. But, even without it, the main feature of the GTInspector is exactly to be extended the way people want and not impose a fixed way. This is completely different from what existed before. In fact, half a year ago there was no problem that people could neither choose nor extend anything. In the meantime, we can extend our workflows significantly. Adding the various flavors of browsing objects is perhaps a couple of lines long and each of us can tweak it because there is no higher entity that should decide anymore.
What I cannot quite grasp is that while we pride ourselves with working on a reflective language, when we have reflective tools, we seem to not be able to take half an hour to build the tool that fits our needs. I am still wondering what is needed to improve this. I think that it's a problem of exercise or of communication, but it seems that just providing the examples that I linked before is not enough and most people look at the inspector still as a black box tool. I will try to work on a tutorial to see if it gets better, but do you find the moldability proposition not valuable or just unclear?
I think this is pretty clear and we have already many examples on how to extend the inspector (marcus made some great addition for the compiled method view (source code / bytecde / block scope trees) I don't think "inspector as a black box tool" is the problem, eye inspector has this possibility and there were already some "special" views used. But sometimes I just want one tool to inspect or explore an object, without multiple scrolling pages, maybe I am just used to it.
But, as I said, there can still be a valid reason to enable a basic inspector that relies on a minimal of libraries (so, definitely not the Spec one) for the same reason we have an emergency debugger.
Cheers, Doru