Hi Evan, Thanks for this mail. I am really happy that you are seeing Pharo as such a productive environment.
I also think the direction of Trantor is highly interesting. Cheers, Doru On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 1:44 AM, Evan Donahue <emdon...@gmail.com> wrote: > Ah, yes, by 'offline' I did mean outside of the mailing list, but that was > purely out of consideration for the list. If the list wants to hear it, far > be it from me to keep it from them. > > For my part, I am a graduate student working on my dissertation, and I > have been trying to build tools to facilitate that as I go, from taking and > sharing notes, to visualizing primary material, to (eventually) organizing > and writing the dissertation. I have been following Offray's updates with > interest, as I think my goals are very much allied, but I am starting in a > slightly different place, if I have understood correctly (research and > organizing, and not yet writing, sharing, or publishing). My efforts thus > far have been concentrated in two repositories: > > Chancery (http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~EvanDonahue/Chancery) is an early > prototype for a note taking system. I am coming from taking notes in emacs > org-mode, and so Chancery right now is the most straightforward collapsable > tree outliner/note taker that could give me functionality basically > equivalent to what I had in org-mode, and serve as a platform to co-evolve > my research methods and their supporting technology. The near-term goals > for this involve adding metadata (authors, dates, etc) to the sources I am > annotating and using that for various kinds of historical visualization > (and further, attendant annotation) eg who wrote what when, referencing > who, influenced by what, etc), and can I edit all that directly in its > graphical form. The status of this project is that it is usable by myself > and those I have worked with on it (and I use it as my primary note taking > system), but I'm not sure what it would look like to someone loading it at > the moment (no real intro/docs, as it was just a quick prototype to provoke > further design discussion). > > Trantor (http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~EvanDonahue/Trantor) is a > disttributed p2p system for incrementally keeping data structures in sync > between multiple, asynchronously connected pharo instances across the > internet without requiring human attention to resolve merge conflicts > (think laptos where data is edited offline and then automatically synced > when they connect to one another); it is my answer to sharing and > collaboration for things created in Chancery (although it is a more general > purpose project). Functionally, Trantor provides a set of common datatypes > (set, dict, text blob, etc) and a means to run nodes and peer them for > synchronization of said datatypes. The goal with respect to > Chancery/personal information management is being able to easily grab some > structured set of notes or writing out of the note taking system and share > it with collaborators or colleagues with a button click, and without having > to go through the whole export/send/manage versions dance. This project is > about 85% complete, the proof of concept works, it just needs a big > refactor to make it usable and quash some bugs. > > I guess my observations on using Pharo thus far are first, that it is > absolutely ideal for evolving prototypes, since you get a sort of poor > man's gui and persistance (object inspector + image serialization) > basically for free, which is 90% of the work of such a simple information > management app prototype. I have a fully functional tree outliner at a > point when in another language I would still be trying to hack a low > functionality command line interface. The other thing I've found refreshing > is that my application can live as one among many within the image, sharing > data with other programs by passing objects around in a way that is > impossible to do with a standalone application running on a modern > operating system. the dream of the web is, I think, heading more in this > direction, but working with the browser (as I was before I came to pharo) > requires coordinating a separate server process, compressing everything > into http/html/json, and a host of other problems that vanish when you can > just serialize objects between pharo instances. In short, I'm getting a lot > done in this language and I expect I'll be around for a while. > > Cheers, > Evan > -- www.tudorgirba.com "Every thing has its own flow"
