Glamorous Toolkit is the moldable development environment. It is a live notebook. It is a flexible search interface. It is a fancy code editor. It is a software analysis platform. It is a data visualization engine. All in one. And it is free and open-source under an MIT license.
We want the environment to fit the context of the current system and when it does not, we want to be able to mold it live. This seemingly small change is transformational and can be utilized in many ways.
Whatever is shown on the screen is rendered in one single rendering tree. No canvas in between. That means that all layouts are regular layouts, including the graph layouts and text-editor layouts. That means that text is made of regular elements. And that means that all elements can be combinable without imposing a technical limit.
I mentioned it on the fediverse, but someone (could be Feenk, or anyone) would do well to make available a “Shelby-ized” Chromium or Firefox distribution consisting of a lightly modified form of the browser in question where the only difference between it and the stock build available from the “first-party” vendor (i.e. Google, Mozilla…) is that the first-party Web developer tools are replaced with a Glamorous Toolkit-derived inspector, &c.
Being shrewd/savvy/aggressive enough on execution would make this combo the preferred toolset for modern webdevs, sort of the same way that Firefox + Firebug was the weapon of choice for many up until Chrome and its native inspector became good enough to fulfill the same purpose. The point would be not to put Pharo/GT on the Web, but just to expose a mainstream audience to GT’s role as a tool for exploration. With enough exposure, the lessons, takeaways afforded by this way of working would find their way into other programming systems.
