We are building Glamorous Toolkit to show how that can work in practice. Now, here is a secret. We do not do it to show others. We do it to show ourselves. We did not know how the environment would look like when we started. And we do not quite know how it will look in the future either.
Why? Because this is uncharted territory. The way we navigate this territory is by observing, formulating hypotheses and building experiments to evaluate them. One of these observations is that the I in IDE stands for integrated. It stands for integrated because development implies making multi faceted decisions that require many perspectives simultaneously. Yet, when we look at software development today we see a space of fragmented tools. Just consider how editors are often different from instrumentation tools which are different from API tools. Forming a multi faceted opinion becomes hard not necessarily because we cannot formulate it, but because we have to piece together the picture manually.
Another observation is that the integration must go well past the developer. Decisions need to be collective and informed, and the only way to reach that goal is to make the inside of the system explainable to the different stakeholders. Narratives play a crucial role in this. We need them to make sense of a situation. We need them to communicate with our peers. We need them to reach a consensus.
The hypothesis we put forward is that the primary job of the environment is to help us construct, consume and share many narratives with and about our systems. This led us to create a new kind of a development experience. We made every object be able to tell stories through custom views and actions. We made it possible for each object to know how to search itself. We made the debugger change its shape whenever there is an interesting event on the stack. We made the editor be able to adapt to the code we are writing. We bridge the gap between coding and documentation through examples (tests that return objects). We created live documents out of all these.
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