Re: [Pharo-users] The cool implication of gtDocumentor gluing examples and how we might augment source naviagation

Hi,

On Jun 26, 2018, at 1:16 PM, Tim Mackinnon <tim@testit.works> wrote:

Hi guys - not sure how many people noticed this, but at the end of the tutorial for gtDocumentor, there is a section on Examples as Documentation.

Thanks for going through the tutorial. Quick questions: - how did it feel to go through it? - did applying changes work fine for you? - was there any confusion about what happened and where you were in the tutorial? - anything missing that might have helped?

What is neat (and easily missed) is how when an example references another - there is a little triangle you can toggle to expose that example inline. (See photo).

This isn’t a completely new ideas (didn’t Newspeak hopscotch do this?) but its very well done in gtDocumentor and this implication could be that if our code editors had this too - then its very handy to unfold code to understand it in one place without having to open new windows. (I still think there are times when you may want to do that - particularly for long chains of methods?) but its certainly an idea that I would be very receptive to having in our code browsers (heck - give me all of gtDocumentor in our source editors).

This actually a new take on the nature of an editor. Hopscotch did not allow expanding things inside the text editor. The editor was always a leaf, and it is so in all editors I have seen so far. In our case, the triangle is added live by the syntax highlighter. Right now, we only use it for navigating examples both because we needed to explore how we can make deeply nested examples simple to reason about, and because we wanted to validate the Bloc architecture. Of course, this ability is usable in many different ways. For example, the embedding in Pillar of various artifacts is done using the same mechanisms. And I think you will start seeing all sorts of applications in the UI area that you will simply not see in other places.

I’m wondering what others thing of this? Perhpas not for Pharo 7 - but Pharo 8 (pretty please?)

Tim

p.s. Note to @feenk, as its the last example its incredibly tricky to expand it to actually see it well as you can’t scroll further down to then drag the window bigger. I had to add a lot of Cr’s to make some space to do this.

Thanks. Indeed, the resizer solution you see now is just a first attempt without much polishing. Cheers, Doru

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-- www.tudorgirba.com www.feenk.com "Problem solving efficiency grows with the abstractness level of problem understanding."