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 âworkspaceâ and not âplaygroundâ⦠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 âok for adding, but please let the old tools tooâ 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better than written documentation (and we have several books now of written documentation, is just that some of them is outdated).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 <astares@gmx.de> 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.