Tudor Gîrba on how Moldable Development Offers a Novel Way to Reason About Systems

Challenges in Software Development

• Developers spend a majority of their time comprehending systems to determine their next steps, primarily through implicitly reading code. (1m32s)
• The objective of reading code is to facilitate system modifications, serving as a manual method for extracting information from various data sources like code, configurations, logs, and production system signals. (3m10s)

Need for Context-Aware Tools

• Software development necessitates context-aware tools due to the unpredictable nature of specific problems encountered within systems. (3m46s)
• Instead of generic clicking tools, developers require adaptable building blocks to create customized tools tailored to their specific system contexts. (5m11s)

Limitations of Existing Tools

• Unit tests are a form of analysis that provide a feedback loop for developers, but they are not typically shared or reused across different systems. (6m8s)
• Static analysis tools, while downloaded and used by many, often focus on commonalities between systems and may not capture the specific values of a particular system, leading to a large number of warnings that may not be relevant. (6m33s)

Moldable Development: A New Approach

• Moldable development aims to introduce a new feedback loop that allows for a deeper understanding of a system's inner workings, going beyond the interface level discussions of agile development and the technical deployment focus of DevOps. (9m11s)
• This approach treats development problems as data problems, where the focus is on finding the best representation to understand and approach the problem. (11m41s)

Understanding Systems Through Mental Models

• People often create summaries and drawings of systems based on their beliefs about the system, not on the system's actual state. (11m27s)
• When working with systems, individuals often develop mental models, which, while not entirely accurate, are helpful for understanding and navigating the system. (12m57s)

Importance of Communication and Visualization

• Communication, often through visual representations like automatically generated pictures, plays a crucial role in synchronizing understanding and decision-making within a team working on a system. (13m51s)
• This approach emphasizes enhancing an individual's ability to find answers to their questions about a system, increasing the likelihood of shared understanding within a team. (16m9s)

Moldable Development Environments

• Moldable development environments are being explored as a way to improve the process of understanding and working with existing codebases. (17m2s)
• Current development environments are primarily designed for writing code, not for understanding or analyzing it, leading to difficulties in tasks like system modification or code reuse. (16m43s)

Sustainability of Software Development

• The current approach to software development, focused on rapid creation without efficient methods for understanding and adapting existing systems, is argued to be unsustainable in the long term. (19m40s)
• There is a significant amount of money and resources allocated to understanding and working with existing code, estimated at \$250 billion per year globally. (22m59s)

Applications of Moldable Development

• Moldable development can be applied to various use cases, including observability, where the goal is to bring decision-making closer to the time of problem identification. (25m50s)
• It can also be used for representing and visualizing domain-specific languages directly within the development environment, bridging the gap between whiteboard designs and code. (26m17s)
• Moldable development allows developers to inspect objects in a debugger and have meaningful conversations with business people about the system's state. (26m40s)
• Moldable development can be used to reverse engineer data, such as personal data downloaded from Facebook, to understand its implications fully. (27m3s)

Glamorous Toolkit: A Case Study

• Glamorous Toolkit, a moldable development environment written in Pharo (a Smalltalk dialect), enables developers to create custom tools and provides a case study for moldable development principles. (29m21s)
• Glamorous Toolkit is a software development environment that provides a different perspective on development environments and unifies them with Knowledge Management and notebooks. (31m21s)
• Glamorous Toolkit can be used to visualize a user's own knowledge base. (31m44s)
• Glamorous Toolkit is an exploration tool and a productive tool that can be used to explore a large space in the software development industry. (34m26s)