10 ms·

New IDE: code bubbles

414 points by maxharris 17y ago

perplexes 17y ago
Reminds me of Squeak, first, because of the white->blue gradients. Second, this is like the Canon Cat/Archy (Raskin interfaces), where you have tons of room, and you just demarcate segments you want to look at. What was striking for me was the "capture my workspace and send in email" feature. Couple this with the Omniscient Debugger (http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/ http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/), and you've got me sold. Oh, but I'm a Ruby programmer.
- Groxx 17y ago
  I've wondered for a long time why debuggers don't all have a "back" feature. Small controls on what's saved / how much memory can be used seem to me to be easy to add to any debugger. Just save memory states and rewind, the whole thing can be implemented with a stack. If someone knows a good reason, I'd be interested. You've ended up adding more things for me to read / look into. I love programming... there's no way I can keep up with it all, so there's always something interesting.
  - chronomex 17y ago
    GDB 7 has supported going in reverse for few months now: http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/news/reversible.html http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/news/reversible.html
matrixownsyou 17y ago
nice. i can see myself using this for django projects (a bubble for the urls.py, another for the view and another for the template)
- guelo 17y ago
  I'm thinking this won't work so well for dynamic languages. The demo video is using a Java project.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    Because not declaring the type of variables makes code not work with bubbles?
    - guelo 17y ago
      The demo is relying heavily on code navigation features that are only available to static language IDEs such as "Open Declaration", "Find All References", code completion, navigating object hierarchies, code outlines, inline docs, and other fancy code traversal techniques.
      - mulander 17y ago
        Take a look at Squeak. The Smalltalk folks have been doing this for a long time with the GUI utilities. SLIME is another dynamic environment that knows and can tell You much about itself.
        jrockway 17y ago
        This information comes from actually running the code. Not that this is a bad thing, though. People seem really afraid of having the code they just wrote be executed, but I think this is an unfounded fear. And, as SLIME shows, you get great information from running the code; much better than mere static analysis.
        nitrogen 17y ago
        I was about to ask, "Why don't they just run the code, and provide something like reverse debugging or VM state snapshots to explore different code paths?" but it seems that's already been covered.
      - jrockway 17y ago
        These things are possible in dynamic languages with static analysis, it's just not as easy. (Oh, and if you write code that's unreadable, then the static analysis fails. But most people don't do that.)
- utku_karatas2 17y ago
  Your wish might come true (author of pfaide(pfaide.com) here). I'm so intrigued by the idea I wanna drop everything at hand and take a grab at this ;)
hvs 17y ago
Looks like something that should be implemented as a plugin for Eclipse or Visual Studio. Kind of interesting, though.
- gridspy 17y ago
  I guess that is why it is an eclipse plugin. Pity it doesn't interoperate with all eclipse-compatible languages (just yet). I'd love to use it to work with Python.
gridspy 17y ago
Hopefully this will make working on the Gridspy project easier. Typically I have 3 IDEs open - my Firmware IDE, Eclipse + Visual Studio. In Eclipse I am editing a twisted project (usually 3 different files at once but only 2 methods from each) and a Django project (probably about 10 files to juggle there). In Visual studio, I tend to have another 10 files open (the firmware builds to Win32 too). God it would be awesome to have all that on one monitor in little bubbles.
Quiark 17y ago
Reminds me of Smalltalk...
- jcromartie 17y ago
  Specifically Squeak... I wonder if it is built with Squeak?
  - Semiapies 17y ago
    No, Eclipse.
    - jcromartie 17y ago
      It is an Eclipse plugin, yes, but it could still be written in Squeak?
  - t_crayford 17y ago
    Eclipse was originally built in smalltalk…
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- t_crayford 17y ago
  The original version of eclipse was written in smalltalk…
  - allertonm 17y ago
    Hmmm. I assume you're referring to VisualAge. It's a bit of a stretch to call that "the original version of Eclipse". A predecessor, yes - but the only thing the two have in common is that they were both IDEs.
aheilbut 17y ago
C-x 2 C-x 3
- jfager 17y ago
  Not even kind of the same thing.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    But very close (conceptually) to `find-tag-other-window`, except with fewer pretty colors.
- viraptor 17y ago
  Without screenshots / explanation / some more content, you're not very informative... (edit: I know it's emacs, but without explanations it's like saying C-x M-c M-butterflies)
  - JabavuAdams 17y ago
    Emacs ism First split the screen horizontally, then split the current panel vertically. Not the same thing, at all.
  - aheilbut 17y ago
    Alright, I confess to being a little glib; however, I'm merely suggesting another way that people already commonly "see many fragments of code (or other information) at once without having to navigate back and forth."' It's not nearly as slick as code bubbles, but it does work for many of the use cases suggested above.
    - Qz 17y ago
      Slickness is an underrated quality of good user interfaces.
      - voidpointer 17y ago
d4ft 17y ago
I feel like the response has been fairly lukewarm, but to me this is some really nice (dare I say game-changing) stuff. Mindmap + IDE = great. Why? I have written in a variety of languages, and my number one complaint, whether it be with eclipse, textmate, vim, emacs, whatever, is the clumsiness of going from one file to another and then back to the original. Further, outside of actual development, when debugging, I really like to have all the different pieces open at once. This is a nice way for this to happen and is pretty slick with the different gui movement options. I, like other posters, would be really psyched if you could have some kind of MVC opener which would automagically open all the code files using a certain view. That would save a lot of time shuffling, and then save a lot of time by having them all displayed simultaneously. Anyway, I'm probably over reacting, but after years of having to go back to the mouse everytime i need to look at a new file or struggling to figure out in which square i put which file, this is definitely, in my opinion, a step in right direction.
- mrcharles 17y ago
  I think there's some really interesting stuff here that should be leveraged. What I like best is that it really focuses your mind on the task at hand. You don't spend a lot of time looking through large amounts of code just to find a few things. I wouldn't like the UI directly as presented, but there's certainly a starting point there. Really though, don't know what kind of programmer would accept line wrap on code. Urf.
  - Silhouette 17y ago
    > Really though, don't know what kind of programmer would accept line wrap on code. Urf. I'd happily accept syntactically- and semantically-aware line wrap, if someone could do it and get it right. Combine that with elastic tabs that actually work, add a standard set of layout rules that gives good results, and provide bullets to shoot anyone who thinks coding standards should be about whether the space goes before or after that `*` when declaring a pointer, and I'm sold. :-)
- jrockway 17y ago
  my number one complaint, whether it be with eclipse, textmate, vim, emacs, whatever, is the clumsiness of going from one file to another and then back to the original Emacs has a stack for this. Jump to related definition with M-., jump back to where you were before with M-∗. One keystroke is not exactly "clumsy", IMHO. I, like other posters, would be really psyched if you could have some kind of MVC opener which would automagically open all the code files using a certain view. I just open all files in the project with `eproject-open-all-project-files`. Then I can iswitchb between them. (Of course, there are lots of extensions that don't require you to have the files open to easily navigate to them; eproject, anything, ido, etc.)
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
JabavuAdams 17y ago
Very cool. This is closer to how I envision my ideal IDE.
abyx 17y ago
2 things 1. /Way/ too much mouse-action for coding in my opinion 2. I saw no mention of the best killer feature I can see for this, which is allowing refactoring and restructuring of code by extract bubbles, moving them around, popping bubbles... I've been wanting to perform refactorings in a visible fashion for quite some time now.
viraptor 17y ago
I see how useful it could be, but I wonder if it would be good for me. So far I've tried to run in exactly the opposite direction: 1. not using mouse at all 2. concentrating on what needs to be done to what object... not where I'm a heavy Vim user, so I'm relying on ctags / incremental searching / positions stack for a lot of work. This goes exactly the other way - click your way through to the point you want to get to. On the other hand, I'd probably prefer to fix bugs in this environment instead of in Vim, because it gives a lot more context and freedom. It looks good for... let's say "exploratory programming". Maybe it's time to think 2 different IDEs - for "writing code" and for "modifying code"?
- Vivtek 17y ago
  But to your #2 - that seems to me to be exactly what this IDE is doing. That's the way I see it, anyway.
  - viraptor 17y ago
    It's better than normal eclipse for sure - you get the arrow link between related methods, etc. What I meant is that in Vim I go to a name in ctags. That's what happens - whether I'm in the same file, or different, or I looked at that tag before. Type in tag name -> go - that's all that happens. With code bubbles, I could have the bubble already open, but just off the screen. Or maybe it's open in another dependency. Or maybe it's not open at all. I have to look at the screen, localise the bubble, make a decision and then do the action (either click existing bubble, or open a new one). Of course it's too early to criticise it, without testing beforehand. But it definitely got my attention, as something I tried to avoid. Having one good way to access stuff == less thinking. Let's say that Vim is stateless, but bubbles are stateful :)
    - nitrogen 17y ago
      It should be possible to add equivalent keyboard shortcuts to Code Bubbles, so that finding a nearby bubble could be accomplished by ESC,/tagname or something.
- 17y ago
chaosmachine 17y ago
Wow, I've been dreaming of being able to do exactly this for a long time, but I didn't think I'd ever see it implemented.
Vivtek 17y ago
That is a very interesting approach - instead of just presenting files, this IDE is already abstracting out some of the semantic structure for you and presenting code based on its relationships. It's meeting you halfway. And it keeps track of things the way you work - by explicitly acknowledging the task structure of the work, it's again meeting you halfway. This is a really promising start. Very cool.
- jasonkester 17y ago
  Programming hasn't been about files for a long time now. That's the reason that we have IDEs in the first place, and why I cringe when people talk about writing code in a text editor. Any IDE worth its salt will do all the things in that video, except for the little draggable bubbles.
  - lambdom 17y ago
    With those great IDE, you can do everything, but not editing effectivly :p
  - jrockway 17y ago
    I cringe when people talk about writing code in a text editor Yeah, because we have to type M-. to navigate to the related code. (Also, insert rant about how "UNIX is my IDE".)
    - mseebach 17y ago
      Emacs is a text editor in the same way the space shuttle is a vehicle.
      - jrockway 17y ago
        But unfortunately, very few IDE users are aware of this.
      - mixmax 17y ago
        Yes, it's equally hard to operate.
cookiecaper 17y ago
I don't think there's any reason to put the default video embed at 1080p. Just wasted a lot of my bandwidth, honestly; I didn't make it full-screen or anything and would have been fine with 360/480p
- voidpointer 17y ago
  It's great they put it up that way as that seems to be the native resolution the demo was recorded at. That way, you get the optimum display quality of the text. Since most of the screen stays the same much of the time, it isn't that much of a bandwidth waster after all even at the higher resolution.
BigZaphod 17y ago
Whoa. This looks kind of amazing! It's almost like an evolution of the Smalltalk browser approach, but in a direction I would not have expected. I think I like it!
davidw 17y ago
Looks pretty cool actually. There are often times when I need to see a little bit of code from a number of files, to trace what's happening. Anyone care to make an emacs mode for this?:-)
keltex 17y ago
Note: requires monitor with 2560 x 1600 resolution.
- jrockway 17y ago
  1920x1200, actually. And that is not too uncommon; I've had my monitor at home for 5 years and it's that resolution.
  - viraptor 17y ago
    I'd highly recommend any serious programmer with a screen smaller than 1920x1200, to upgrade... and get two of them while they're at it. After some time with that setup, it becomes painful to get back to something smaller. I've tried 3 screens (in: square, wide, square configuration) for a while. I wouldn't say no, if anyone gave me that again, but I didn't notice any significant improvement over 2 screens.
    - jrockway 17y ago
      I've written lots of good code on my 9" eeepc, and didn't really hate the experience that much. Conversely, I have 2 19" monitors at work, and don't really find it productive at all. (We are asking for 2x 30", which should help.) The difference is that I use Linux/xmonad on my eeepc, and Windows XP at work. A good window manager will make your computing experience 1000x more enjoyable than a new monitor will. (As I mentioned above, I have a 24" monitor at home and use xmonad with that. Needless to say, that is the best environment of the three.)
snprbob86 17y ago
This is awesome! I'm kind of a weird mixed-bread developer. I'm now a heavy Vim user, but was once a heavy IntelliJ IDEA user. I'm also currently a heavy Resharper user at work. I understand the importance of really solid, visual tools, but I also understand the importance of simplicity and flexibility. There is a middle ground, I know it. As an aside, I think that the GUI toolkit confusion is one of the biggest blockers to this sort of innovation. Terminal emulation is just the lowest common denominator. HTML/JS/CSS is the closest thing we have towards a portable, successful GUI toolkit. And it's simply still not quite ready to fight the advanced desktop graphics battle necessary for this sort of new bread of tools.
houseabsolute 17y ago
This is the IDE I didn't know I was missing. Navigating around the code is undoubtedly the highest overhead task I do. This IDE seems like it fixes that problem.
ximeng 17y ago
Interesting idea. Drawing a line between two procedures to find the shortest call path between them could save time navigating an unfamiliar codebase. Edit: Also interesting - storing an old debug session with state and being able to visually compare that with a debug session made after code changes.
peter_severin 17y ago
I love Eclipse for enabling stuff like this.
leif 17y ago
Seems the next logical progression of the LXR. I'd love to see the linux kernel in this.
Groxx 17y ago
There are a LOT of good ideas in there. Will definitely have to watch / possibly extend this... * saves for later
InclinedPlane 17y ago
Regardless of anyone's opinions of this particular IDE / workflow it's been clear for a while that the future of developer tools will almost certainly include: - IDEs that take advantage of greater knowledge of code than just a simple organization of text files (e.g. reflection, call stacks, static and dynamic analysis, etc.) - Tying bug-tracking, automated testing, and source control together in a coherent way. - Generally merging the developer workflow into a seamless experience instead of a disjoint series of steps across N sets of distinct tools. Already we're seeing plenty of movement in this direction, with things like visual studio's intellisense, more in-IDE unit test tools, and the plethora of refactoring tools out there. The days of IDEs that do little more than compile and keep track of collections of files for you are numbered.
gchpaco 17y ago
This is one of the first things I've seen—for any language—that could be more useful and powerful than Smalltalk environments. The most useful feature IMHO is the chaining but having find references and the like in there is extremely attractive.
thetable 17y ago
It's odd that it's so rare in software to find window widgets that push each other out of the way instead of overlapping. I'm thinking of the gazillion pallettes in Adobe CS that always occlude each other. You'd think they'd have figured that out by now.
- breck 17y ago
  I never even thought of that. Any examples of software that does this?
  - lnp 17y ago
    blender
  - nex3 17y ago
    Any tiling window manager will have a mode, usually the default, where no windows will be occluded. Instead, all screen space is divided among them according to some algorithm.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Indeed. Remember that overlapping windows was a tech demo to show how powerful the graphics processing was. It was never intended to actually be a production feature.
- altano 17y ago
  Visual Studio sort of does this. When you drag one pane over another, the default is to have the panes be tiled or tabbed (depending on where you drag it). It's all very intuitive too, with the arrows to guide you through what you're doing. Visual Studio's window management is totally awesome and one of my favorite features.
  - mhansen 17y ago
    Does it work well with multiple monitors yet?
sofal 17y ago
Guys, we need a better way for exploring big open source projects (like Android, for example), preferably online. Google Code Search is pretty good, but I think there is so much more that can be done.
- alexgartrell 17y ago
  The most striking thing is how few people here have addressed this point. Everyone seems to be living in a fantasy land where "learning APIs" is as hairy as it gets. I've messed with portions of the Linux Kernel, Chromium, Mozilla, and Coda Filesystem codebases. In each occasion, tools like code-search (provided by lxr.linux.no, mxr.mozilla.org, Google COde, and even `find . | xargs grep`) have been invaluable in getting anything done. Chromium, Mozilla, and the Linux Kernel were unpleasant, but manageable with the existing tools, because of the incredibly strict guidelines imposed upon contributors as far as code style and other things. On the flip side, the Coda Filesystem, which has grown as the result of many relatively disjoint Ph.D. research projects) requires a whole lot of help and handholding from the guys who have put a decade into it already. I can only imagine private code bases being a LOT worse. An IDE that makes semantic relationships more obvious to the new guys would do a lot to ramp new people up faster and would really be a huge benefit from a community standpoint as well as just being generally helpful to existing developers. That said, this is a good first step, and not necessarily perfect. It kind of looks like a toy now, so managing screen real-estate better would be the next big step, I think.
  - nitrogen 17y ago
    Do you find that "find . | xargs grep" is more useful than "grep -HnR" in some way? I recommend setting up cscope for hacking the kernel. I haven't done any kernel hacking for a while, but when I did I found cscope (and vim+cscope) very helpful. Since it's database-driven and designed to run on systems from the 80s, it's still extremely fast.
shaunxcode 17y ago
I have an unfinished project where I was attempting something similar - I am going to throw it up on google code now and I guess put up a demo in case anyone is interested in the code. It's all just simple javascript/jquery proof of concept. You can see it here http://www.churchofturing.com/dragedit/dragedit.html http://www.churchofturing.com/dragedit/dragedit.html and google code is http://dragedit.googlecode.com http://dragedit.googlecode.com
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Nice stuff! I just played around with it for a bit and it seems you have the basis of something interesting there, now for an application!
  - shaunxcode 17y ago
    thanks - I am always hesitant to release projects where I know it is only a quarter of the way there. But what good does it do just having it sit on my hard drive? hah. There are some key bindings working ctrl+space creates a new editing pane, ctrl+arrow keys should let you move between panes - however I wrote this so long ago that I did not know ctrl+space brings up a menu on mac. hah. The other key bindings do not seem to work on my mac either. If I get some time this weekend I think I will polish this up, get saving/loading/exporting working etc.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      I've had this idea for a while and maybe this can be a part of implementing it: A website where programmers can contribute 'widgets' which can be mashed together to create applications. Widgets would be written in python, and would have access to a bunch of underlying services and to other widgets. You'd use an interface like what you have here as the 'ide' to create the bits and pieces of code that go in to making a component, and then a similar interface to combine components in to working websites. The end result would be hosted on the same service, either using your own URL or using a subdomain of the service. It sounds like a large amount of work though, to get that up and running, especially the security angle is a complicated one.
jacquesm 17y ago
This reminds me of the software that comes with the lego robotics sets.
- axod 17y ago
  Yeah. good for learning how to program, but silly afterwards.
buster 17y ago
For everyone who has worked on a project with multiple directories, files, people and technology this looks really promising (if not awesome).
motters 17y ago
Looks good. It's so rare to see any real innovation in development IDEs. I also like the idea of colour coding bubbles or attaching icons to them, and being able to arrange them in chronological order.
brianobush 17y ago
Neat concept, the problem I see immediately as it assumes I am coding in Java. This would be fine if you worked in only one language. I work in several languages within an average day.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Hopefully the interface points are well-defined enough that you wouldn't need a view like this over the entire set of projects.
owinebarger 17y ago
I think they're trying to reduce the impact of the superhuman levels of concentration displayed by the uberhackers. I don't like it.
- 0x44 17y ago
  I disagree, they're augmenting the current impact of a super-human level of concentration displayed by an "uberhacker" by giving the fruits of that capacity to everyone. Automating a super-human level of concentration in one part of the development process will free up brain cycles for use elsewhere. The best developers won't instantly cease to be the best developers because of a mind-mapping IDE.
  - owinebarger 17y ago
    The second sentence of my earlier post was my idea of comedy.
ivankirigin 17y ago
I'd like to see a mini map view, like in StarCraft, where you could select an area to instantly pan to that set of bubbles. edit: ohh the top bar acts like that. Kinda cool. Very biased against vertical scrolling, which might be bad for certain kinds of files.
- mulander 17y ago
  It has a mini map on the top of the screen.
jaytee_clone 17y ago
I'm sure there's an emacs mode for that ;)
chubbard 17y ago
I like the concepts of the bubbles and the fact that it show call execution so well instead of one file at a time. That's really cool, but what I find so amazing is that since they built on top of Eclipse they got much further towards a usable system like having an integrated debugger was a nice surprise to me. 10-20 years ago the gap between an academic project and a finished product would have been much wider. Not to mention they got to explore more ground with the concept. Just shows how open source software enables innovation better.
pgbovine 17y ago
this sort of thing would be awesome for boosting developer productivity if they have 3 24" monitors ... nowadays it's quite affordable to buy 3 24" monitors (at ~$300 a piece), and when they're all linked-up horizontally, an IDE like this one could truly kick butt
Semiapies 17y ago
The smart tiling and interaction of "bubbles", beyond just IDE-centric actions, most intrigued me. I'm reminded, of all things, of playing with the Acme editor. The overarching task bar with nameable, savable, and shareable sessions was nice, too. Such things strike me as generalizable beyond just IDEs.
scotty79 17y ago
Maybe dumb Microsoft MDI concept will stop to haunt us now. Each IDE for last 15 years has same set of functions, and they are vastly insufficient. Shit that happens in your typical program is really much harder to observe then it should be. Program is interconnected mutating tree. Why the hell we are looking at its latest snapshot through set of flat files showing encoded parts of these trees grouped chaotically? On the other hand, why anyone who tries to actually show trees forces me to enter 2+(2*5) as five nodes without using my keyboard?
angusgr 17y ago
I thought this was a really interesting idea. In uni (college) I became pretty dependent on Mind Maps (using FreeMind) for planning essays. Laying all the relevant concepts and relationships out visually worked really well for me. From that angle, I think anything that helps programmers visualize the structure of their software is a good thing. I think any half-decent programmer is good at maintaining these kind of relationship graphs in their head, anyhow. But that's no reason why tooling can't make that even better. There's potential for a programmer to visualise the structure of their program, beyond what they can hold in their head. I also like that this idea encourages good overall design, short logically arranged methods, and neatly compartmentalises "workspaces" in a visual way. I have a few criticisms, though: - Nowhere near enough keyboard-driving for my liking. :). - It'd be great if zooming out could transform the representation a bit, so instead of ant-size pieces of code the user could work with only the higher-level abstractions between the bubbles they've laid out. I see this happening from the "groups" and "workspaces", but not being inferred from the code itself. - Is there some other way to show bubbles that were opened independently, but are actually related in the code? Apart from drawing a specific line and seeing the call graph (which is neat, btw.) - I'm concerned about what happens when a single workspace gets bigger than a single window. - What happens when design (as it often needs to) breaks through neatly defined abstractions, and lines start needing to be drawn all over the place. Can Code Bubbles represent this without driving the programmer insane, and (also) can it represent this in a way which encourages the programmer to see better ways to refactor? - Arbitrary areas and names, in a flat namespace on a flat 2D plane, with no relationships between them, is nice and simple. However, it seems like it would limit you when working with big projects and lots of different, but related, spaces.
jurjenh 17y ago
Its refreshing to see new ideas being implemented well. What makes this particularly interesting is the panning desktop metaphor (which seems to be getting more and more popular) and is quite appropriate for multi-touch screens (think ipad). It would be most interesting to see this idea extended in this manner, and possibly alter it so coding can be done differently. One possible way might be to have a collection of functions available, then link them together to create new functions. In most cases, this could be done using relatively few commands, so could be done on a touch-only screen.
jamesrcole 17y ago
[edit: fixed link] This approach might be conducive to RFS 5: Development on Handhelds (http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html). Bubbles - smaller chunks of information more suitable for a small display Arranged in a spatial layout - fits with the spatial, panning style of the iPhone UI.
LiveTheDream 17y ago
The main benefit of this IDE, compared to terminal stalwarts vim and emacs, is the effective use of a large, high-resolution screen. The color-coding and context grouping is really slick; IMO vim gets a bit visually confusing if you split windows more than twice. My main gripe about this system would be the normal one of moving back and forth between the keyboard and mouse. Also I wonder how sluggish it gets if you have multiple workspaces and debugger sessions open. The alt+drag static call graph was another cool feature. Ultimately, the best tool is the one you know best. Any IDE will have a very tough time competing with 30-odd years of developers perfecting all the small stuff in vim and emacs.
j23tom 17y ago
now apple should sue them - they inveted it first - no doubt ;)
jwr 17y ago
Now if somebody just plugged this into Emacs, or just got me an extensible (Lisp-based) bubble system with SLIME so that I can connect to a Clojure environment and inspect my code…
tlrobinson 17y ago
Did this vaguely remind anyone else of Hugh Jackman's virus writing "IDE" in Swordfish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUJFOuHIS4Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUJFOuHIS4Q And on that note, how come all academic screencasts are so monotonous?
colings86 17y ago
I really like this, although is views seem to lend themselves very much to functional programming as the bubbles in the demo only show the methods of a class and obtaining a view of a class as a whole does not seem to be inherent to the IDE. With functional programming you only care about the functions so maybe that would be an ideal target for this IDE
defdac 17y ago
What I like about Bubbles is that it manages to visualize the program more like how I think graphically. I've never been a text programmer. I see the code in a visual way in my head, far from typing on a keyboard. About the opposite of Emacs/Vim. I seldom remembers the names of classes and methods, but where they are in a code landscape where the code almost have different kind of colours and textures. Negative space and beautifulness of code is important to me, and it has nothing to do with the text itself. The less I need to use a keyboard the better.
mcormier 17y ago
This is very interesting. To me it looks like it creates a hybrid interface experience in between traditional programming and visual programming languages such as Prograph. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph

414 points by maxharris 17y ago

Reminds me of Squeak, first, because of the white->blue gradients. Second, this is like the Canon Cat/Archy (Raskin interfaces), where you have tons of room, and you just demarcate segments you want to look at. What was striking for me was the "capture my workspace and send in email" feature. Couple this with the Omniscient Debugger (http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/ http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/), and you've got me sold. Oh, but I'm a Ruby programmer.

Groxx 17y ago
I've wondered for a long time why debuggers don't all have a "back" feature. Small controls on what's saved / how much memory can be used seem to me to be easy to add to any debugger. Just save memory states and rewind, the whole thing can be implemented with a stack. If someone knows a good reason, I'd be interested. You've ended up adding more things for me to read / look into. I love programming... there's no way I can keep up with it all, so there's always something interesting.
- chronomex 17y ago
  GDB 7 has supported going in reverse for few months now: http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/news/reversible.html http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/news/reversible.html

matrixownsyou 17y ago

nice. i can see myself using this for django projects (a bubble for the urls.py, another for the view and another for the template)

guelo 17y ago
I'm thinking this won't work so well for dynamic languages. The demo video is using a Java project.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Because not declaring the type of variables makes code not work with bubbles?
  - guelo 17y ago
    The demo is relying heavily on code navigation features that are only available to static language IDEs such as "Open Declaration", "Find All References", code completion, navigating object hierarchies, code outlines, inline docs, and other fancy code traversal techniques.
    - mulander 17y ago
      Take a look at Squeak. The Smalltalk folks have been doing this for a long time with the GUI utilities. SLIME is another dynamic environment that knows and can tell You much about itself.
      - jrockway 17y ago
        This information comes from actually running the code. Not that this is a bad thing, though. People seem really afraid of having the code they just wrote be executed, but I think this is an unfounded fear. And, as SLIME shows, you get great information from running the code; much better than mere static analysis.
        nitrogen 17y ago
        I was about to ask, "Why don't they just run the code, and provide something like reverse debugging or VM state snapshots to explore different code paths?" but it seems that's already been covered.
    - jrockway 17y ago
      These things are possible in dynamic languages with static analysis, it's just not as easy. (Oh, and if you write code that's unreadable, then the static analysis fails. But most people don't do that.)
utku_karatas2 17y ago
Your wish might come true (author of pfaide(pfaide.com) here). I'm so intrigued by the idea I wanna drop everything at hand and take a grab at this ;)

hvs 17y ago

Looks like something that should be implemented as a plugin for Eclipse or Visual Studio. Kind of interesting, though.

gridspy 17y ago
I guess that is why it is an eclipse plugin. Pity it doesn't interoperate with all eclipse-compatible languages (just yet). I'd love to use it to work with Python.

gridspy 17y ago

Hopefully this will make working on the Gridspy project easier. Typically I have 3 IDEs open - my Firmware IDE, Eclipse + Visual Studio. In Eclipse I am editing a twisted project (usually 3 different files at once but only 2 methods from each) and a Django project (probably about 10 files to juggle there). In Visual studio, I tend to have another 10 files open (the firmware builds to Win32 too). God it would be awesome to have all that on one monitor in little bubbles.

Quiark 17y ago

Reminds me of Smalltalk...

jcromartie 17y ago
Specifically Squeak... I wonder if it is built with Squeak?
- Semiapies 17y ago
  No, Eclipse.
  - jcromartie 17y ago
    It is an Eclipse plugin, yes, but it could still be written in Squeak?
- t_crayford 17y ago
  Eclipse was originally built in smalltalk…
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
t_crayford 17y ago
The original version of eclipse was written in smalltalk…
- allertonm 17y ago
  Hmmm. I assume you're referring to VisualAge. It's a bit of a stretch to call that "the original version of Eclipse". A predecessor, yes - but the only thing the two have in common is that they were both IDEs.

aheilbut 17y ago

C-x 2 C-x 3

jfager 17y ago
Not even kind of the same thing.
- jrockway 17y ago
  But very close (conceptually) to `find-tag-other-window`, except with fewer pretty colors.
viraptor 17y ago
Without screenshots / explanation / some more content, you're not very informative... (edit: I know it's emacs, but without explanations it's like saying C-x M-c M-butterflies)
- JabavuAdams 17y ago
  Emacs ism First split the screen horizontally, then split the current panel vertically. Not the same thing, at all.
- aheilbut 17y ago
  Alright, I confess to being a little glib; however, I'm merely suggesting another way that people already commonly "see many fragments of code (or other information) at once without having to navigate back and forth."' It's not nearly as slick as code bubbles, but it does work for many of the use cases suggested above.
  - Qz 17y ago
    Slickness is an underrated quality of good user interfaces.
    - voidpointer 17y ago

d4ft 17y ago

I feel like the response has been fairly lukewarm, but to me this is some really nice (dare I say game-changing) stuff. Mindmap + IDE = great. Why? I have written in a variety of languages, and my number one complaint, whether it be with eclipse, textmate, vim, emacs, whatever, is the clumsiness of going from one file to another and then back to the original. Further, outside of actual development, when debugging, I really like to have all the different pieces open at once. This is a nice way for this to happen and is pretty slick with the different gui movement options. I, like other posters, would be really psyched if you could have some kind of MVC opener which would automagically open all the code files using a certain view. That would save a lot of time shuffling, and then save a lot of time by having them all displayed simultaneously. Anyway, I'm probably over reacting, but after years of having to go back to the mouse everytime i need to look at a new file or struggling to figure out in which square i put which file, this is definitely, in my opinion, a step in right direction.

mrcharles 17y ago
I think there's some really interesting stuff here that should be leveraged. What I like best is that it really focuses your mind on the task at hand. You don't spend a lot of time looking through large amounts of code just to find a few things. I wouldn't like the UI directly as presented, but there's certainly a starting point there. Really though, don't know what kind of programmer would accept line wrap on code. Urf.
- Silhouette 17y ago
  > Really though, don't know what kind of programmer would accept line wrap on code. Urf. I'd happily accept syntactically- and semantically-aware line wrap, if someone could do it and get it right. Combine that with elastic tabs that actually work, add a standard set of layout rules that gives good results, and provide bullets to shoot anyone who thinks coding standards should be about whether the space goes before or after that `*` when declaring a pointer, and I'm sold. :-)
jrockway 17y ago
my number one complaint, whether it be with eclipse, textmate, vim, emacs, whatever, is the clumsiness of going from one file to another and then back to the original Emacs has a stack for this. Jump to related definition with M-., jump back to where you were before with M-∗. One keystroke is not exactly "clumsy", IMHO. I, like other posters, would be really psyched if you could have some kind of MVC opener which would automagically open all the code files using a certain view. I just open all files in the project with `eproject-open-all-project-files`. Then I can iswitchb between them. (Of course, there are lots of extensions that don't require you to have the files open to easily navigate to them; eproject, anything, ido, etc.)

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

JabavuAdams 17y ago

Very cool. This is closer to how I envision my ideal IDE.

abyx 17y ago

2 things 1. /Way/ too much mouse-action for coding in my opinion 2. I saw no mention of the best killer feature I can see for this, which is allowing refactoring and restructuring of code by extract bubbles, moving them around, popping bubbles... I've been wanting to perform refactorings in a visible fashion for quite some time now.

viraptor 17y ago

I see how useful it could be, but I wonder if it would be good for me. So far I've tried to run in exactly the opposite direction: 1. not using mouse at all 2. concentrating on what needs to be done to what object... not where I'm a heavy Vim user, so I'm relying on ctags / incremental searching / positions stack for a lot of work. This goes exactly the other way - click your way through to the point you want to get to. On the other hand, I'd probably prefer to fix bugs in this environment instead of in Vim, because it gives a lot more context and freedom. It looks good for... let's say "exploratory programming". Maybe it's time to think 2 different IDEs - for "writing code" and for "modifying code"?

Vivtek 17y ago
But to your #2 - that seems to me to be exactly what this IDE is doing. That's the way I see it, anyway.
- viraptor 17y ago
  It's better than normal eclipse for sure - you get the arrow link between related methods, etc. What I meant is that in Vim I go to a name in ctags. That's what happens - whether I'm in the same file, or different, or I looked at that tag before. Type in tag name -> go - that's all that happens. With code bubbles, I could have the bubble already open, but just off the screen. Or maybe it's open in another dependency. Or maybe it's not open at all. I have to look at the screen, localise the bubble, make a decision and then do the action (either click existing bubble, or open a new one). Of course it's too early to criticise it, without testing beforehand. But it definitely got my attention, as something I tried to avoid. Having one good way to access stuff == less thinking. Let's say that Vim is stateless, but bubbles are stateful :)
  - nitrogen 17y ago
    It should be possible to add equivalent keyboard shortcuts to Code Bubbles, so that finding a nearby bubble could be accomplished by ESC,/tagname or something.
17y ago

chaosmachine 17y ago

Wow, I've been dreaming of being able to do exactly this for a long time, but I didn't think I'd ever see it implemented.

Vivtek 17y ago

That is a very interesting approach - instead of just presenting files, this IDE is already abstracting out some of the semantic structure for you and presenting code based on its relationships. It's meeting you halfway. And it keeps track of things the way you work - by explicitly acknowledging the task structure of the work, it's again meeting you halfway. This is a really promising start. Very cool.

jasonkester 17y ago
Programming hasn't been about files for a long time now. That's the reason that we have IDEs in the first place, and why I cringe when people talk about writing code in a text editor. Any IDE worth its salt will do all the things in that video, except for the little draggable bubbles.
- lambdom 17y ago
  With those great IDE, you can do everything, but not editing effectivly :p
- jrockway 17y ago
  I cringe when people talk about writing code in a text editor Yeah, because we have to type M-. to navigate to the related code. (Also, insert rant about how "UNIX is my IDE".)
  - mseebach 17y ago
    Emacs is a text editor in the same way the space shuttle is a vehicle.
    - jrockway 17y ago
      But unfortunately, very few IDE users are aware of this.
    - mixmax 17y ago
      Yes, it's equally hard to operate.

cookiecaper 17y ago

I don't think there's any reason to put the default video embed at 1080p. Just wasted a lot of my bandwidth, honestly; I didn't make it full-screen or anything and would have been fine with 360/480p

voidpointer 17y ago
It's great they put it up that way as that seems to be the native resolution the demo was recorded at. That way, you get the optimum display quality of the text. Since most of the screen stays the same much of the time, it isn't that much of a bandwidth waster after all even at the higher resolution.

BigZaphod 17y ago

Whoa. This looks kind of amazing! It's almost like an evolution of the Smalltalk browser approach, but in a direction I would not have expected. I think I like it!

davidw 17y ago

Looks pretty cool actually. There are often times when I need to see a little bit of code from a number of files, to trace what's happening. Anyone care to make an emacs mode for this?:-)

keltex 17y ago

Note: requires monitor with 2560 x 1600 resolution.

jrockway 17y ago
1920x1200, actually. And that is not too uncommon; I've had my monitor at home for 5 years and it's that resolution.
- viraptor 17y ago
  I'd highly recommend any serious programmer with a screen smaller than 1920x1200, to upgrade... and get two of them while they're at it. After some time with that setup, it becomes painful to get back to something smaller. I've tried 3 screens (in: square, wide, square configuration) for a while. I wouldn't say no, if anyone gave me that again, but I didn't notice any significant improvement over 2 screens.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    I've written lots of good code on my 9" eeepc, and didn't really hate the experience that much. Conversely, I have 2 19" monitors at work, and don't really find it productive at all. (We are asking for 2x 30", which should help.) The difference is that I use Linux/xmonad on my eeepc, and Windows XP at work. A good window manager will make your computing experience 1000x more enjoyable than a new monitor will. (As I mentioned above, I have a 24" monitor at home and use xmonad with that. Needless to say, that is the best environment of the three.)

snprbob86 17y ago

This is awesome! I'm kind of a weird mixed-bread developer. I'm now a heavy Vim user, but was once a heavy IntelliJ IDEA user. I'm also currently a heavy Resharper user at work. I understand the importance of really solid, visual tools, but I also understand the importance of simplicity and flexibility. There is a middle ground, I know it. As an aside, I think that the GUI toolkit confusion is one of the biggest blockers to this sort of innovation. Terminal emulation is just the lowest common denominator. HTML/JS/CSS is the closest thing we have towards a portable, successful GUI toolkit. And it's simply still not quite ready to fight the advanced desktop graphics battle necessary for this sort of new bread of tools.

houseabsolute 17y ago

This is the IDE I didn't know I was missing. Navigating around the code is undoubtedly the highest overhead task I do. This IDE seems like it fixes that problem.

ximeng 17y ago

Interesting idea. Drawing a line between two procedures to find the shortest call path between them could save time navigating an unfamiliar codebase. Edit: Also interesting - storing an old debug session with state and being able to visually compare that with a debug session made after code changes.

peter_severin 17y ago

I love Eclipse for enabling stuff like this.

leif 17y ago

Seems the next logical progression of the LXR. I'd love to see the linux kernel in this.

Groxx 17y ago

There are a LOT of good ideas in there. Will definitely have to watch / possibly extend this... * saves for later

InclinedPlane 17y ago

Regardless of anyone's opinions of this particular IDE / workflow it's been clear for a while that the future of developer tools will almost certainly include: - IDEs that take advantage of greater knowledge of code than just a simple organization of text files (e.g. reflection, call stacks, static and dynamic analysis, etc.) - Tying bug-tracking, automated testing, and source control together in a coherent way. - Generally merging the developer workflow into a seamless experience instead of a disjoint series of steps across N sets of distinct tools. Already we're seeing plenty of movement in this direction, with things like visual studio's intellisense, more in-IDE unit test tools, and the plethora of refactoring tools out there. The days of IDEs that do little more than compile and keep track of collections of files for you are numbered.

gchpaco 17y ago

This is one of the first things I've seen—for any language—that could be more useful and powerful than Smalltalk environments. The most useful feature IMHO is the chaining but having find references and the like in there is extremely attractive.

thetable 17y ago

It's odd that it's so rare in software to find window widgets that push each other out of the way instead of overlapping. I'm thinking of the gazillion pallettes in Adobe CS that always occlude each other. You'd think they'd have figured that out by now.

breck 17y ago
I never even thought of that. Any examples of software that does this?
- lnp 17y ago
  blender
- nex3 17y ago
  Any tiling window manager will have a mode, usually the default, where no windows will be occluded. Instead, all screen space is divided among them according to some algorithm.
jrockway 17y ago
Indeed. Remember that overlapping windows was a tech demo to show how powerful the graphics processing was. It was never intended to actually be a production feature.
altano 17y ago
Visual Studio sort of does this. When you drag one pane over another, the default is to have the panes be tiled or tabbed (depending on where you drag it). It's all very intuitive too, with the arrows to guide you through what you're doing. Visual Studio's window management is totally awesome and one of my favorite features.
- mhansen 17y ago
  Does it work well with multiple monitors yet?

sofal 17y ago

Guys, we need a better way for exploring big open source projects (like Android, for example), preferably online. Google Code Search is pretty good, but I think there is so much more that can be done.

alexgartrell 17y ago
The most striking thing is how few people here have addressed this point. Everyone seems to be living in a fantasy land where "learning APIs" is as hairy as it gets. I've messed with portions of the Linux Kernel, Chromium, Mozilla, and Coda Filesystem codebases. In each occasion, tools like code-search (provided by lxr.linux.no, mxr.mozilla.org, Google COde, and even `find . | xargs grep`) have been invaluable in getting anything done. Chromium, Mozilla, and the Linux Kernel were unpleasant, but manageable with the existing tools, because of the incredibly strict guidelines imposed upon contributors as far as code style and other things. On the flip side, the Coda Filesystem, which has grown as the result of many relatively disjoint Ph.D. research projects) requires a whole lot of help and handholding from the guys who have put a decade into it already. I can only imagine private code bases being a LOT worse. An IDE that makes semantic relationships more obvious to the new guys would do a lot to ramp new people up faster and would really be a huge benefit from a community standpoint as well as just being generally helpful to existing developers. That said, this is a good first step, and not necessarily perfect. It kind of looks like a toy now, so managing screen real-estate better would be the next big step, I think.
- nitrogen 17y ago
  Do you find that "find . | xargs grep" is more useful than "grep -HnR" in some way? I recommend setting up cscope for hacking the kernel. I haven't done any kernel hacking for a while, but when I did I found cscope (and vim+cscope) very helpful. Since it's database-driven and designed to run on systems from the 80s, it's still extremely fast.

shaunxcode 17y ago

I have an unfinished project where I was attempting something similar - I am going to throw it up on google code now and I guess put up a demo in case anyone is interested in the code. It's all just simple javascript/jquery proof of concept. You can see it here http://www.churchofturing.com/dragedit/dragedit.html http://www.churchofturing.com/dragedit/dragedit.html and google code is http://dragedit.googlecode.com http://dragedit.googlecode.com

jacquesm 17y ago
Nice stuff! I just played around with it for a bit and it seems you have the basis of something interesting there, now for an application!
- shaunxcode 17y ago
  thanks - I am always hesitant to release projects where I know it is only a quarter of the way there. But what good does it do just having it sit on my hard drive? hah. There are some key bindings working ctrl+space creates a new editing pane, ctrl+arrow keys should let you move between panes - however I wrote this so long ago that I did not know ctrl+space brings up a menu on mac. hah. The other key bindings do not seem to work on my mac either. If I get some time this weekend I think I will polish this up, get saving/loading/exporting working etc.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    I've had this idea for a while and maybe this can be a part of implementing it: A website where programmers can contribute 'widgets' which can be mashed together to create applications. Widgets would be written in python, and would have access to a bunch of underlying services and to other widgets. You'd use an interface like what you have here as the 'ide' to create the bits and pieces of code that go in to making a component, and then a similar interface to combine components in to working websites. The end result would be hosted on the same service, either using your own URL or using a subdomain of the service. It sounds like a large amount of work though, to get that up and running, especially the security angle is a complicated one.

jacquesm 17y ago

This reminds me of the software that comes with the lego robotics sets.

axod 17y ago
Yeah. good for learning how to program, but silly afterwards.

buster 17y ago

For everyone who has worked on a project with multiple directories, files, people and technology this looks really promising (if not awesome).

motters 17y ago

Looks good. It's so rare to see any real innovation in development IDEs. I also like the idea of colour coding bubbles or attaching icons to them, and being able to arrange them in chronological order.

brianobush 17y ago

Neat concept, the problem I see immediately as it assumes I am coding in Java. This would be fine if you worked in only one language. I work in several languages within an average day.

jrockway 17y ago
Hopefully the interface points are well-defined enough that you wouldn't need a view like this over the entire set of projects.

owinebarger 17y ago

I think they're trying to reduce the impact of the superhuman levels of concentration displayed by the uberhackers. I don't like it.

0x44 17y ago
I disagree, they're augmenting the current impact of a super-human level of concentration displayed by an "uberhacker" by giving the fruits of that capacity to everyone. Automating a super-human level of concentration in one part of the development process will free up brain cycles for use elsewhere. The best developers won't instantly cease to be the best developers because of a mind-mapping IDE.
- owinebarger 17y ago
  The second sentence of my earlier post was my idea of comedy.

ivankirigin 17y ago

I'd like to see a mini map view, like in StarCraft, where you could select an area to instantly pan to that set of bubbles. edit: ohh the top bar acts like that. Kinda cool. Very biased against vertical scrolling, which might be bad for certain kinds of files.

mulander 17y ago
It has a mini map on the top of the screen.

jaytee_clone 17y ago

I'm sure there's an emacs mode for that ;)

chubbard 17y ago

I like the concepts of the bubbles and the fact that it show call execution so well instead of one file at a time. That's really cool, but what I find so amazing is that since they built on top of Eclipse they got much further towards a usable system like having an integrated debugger was a nice surprise to me. 10-20 years ago the gap between an academic project and a finished product would have been much wider. Not to mention they got to explore more ground with the concept. Just shows how open source software enables innovation better.

pgbovine 17y ago

this sort of thing would be awesome for boosting developer productivity if they have 3 24" monitors ... nowadays it's quite affordable to buy 3 24" monitors (at ~$300 a piece), and when they're all linked-up horizontally, an IDE like this one could truly kick butt

Semiapies 17y ago

The smart tiling and interaction of "bubbles", beyond just IDE-centric actions, most intrigued me. I'm reminded, of all things, of playing with the Acme editor. The overarching task bar with nameable, savable, and shareable sessions was nice, too. Such things strike me as generalizable beyond just IDEs.

scotty79 17y ago

Maybe dumb Microsoft MDI concept will stop to haunt us now. Each IDE for last 15 years has same set of functions, and they are vastly insufficient. Shit that happens in your typical program is really much harder to observe then it should be. Program is interconnected mutating tree. Why the hell we are looking at its latest snapshot through set of flat files showing encoded parts of these trees grouped chaotically? On the other hand, why anyone who tries to actually show trees forces me to enter 2+(2*5) as five nodes without using my keyboard?

angusgr 17y ago

I thought this was a really interesting idea. In uni (college) I became pretty dependent on Mind Maps (using FreeMind) for planning essays. Laying all the relevant concepts and relationships out visually worked really well for me. From that angle, I think anything that helps programmers visualize the structure of their software is a good thing. I think any half-decent programmer is good at maintaining these kind of relationship graphs in their head, anyhow. But that's no reason why tooling can't make that even better. There's potential for a programmer to visualise the structure of their program, beyond what they can hold in their head. I also like that this idea encourages good overall design, short logically arranged methods, and neatly compartmentalises "workspaces" in a visual way. I have a few criticisms, though: - Nowhere near enough keyboard-driving for my liking. :). - It'd be great if zooming out could transform the representation a bit, so instead of ant-size pieces of code the user could work with only the higher-level abstractions between the bubbles they've laid out. I see this happening from the "groups" and "workspaces", but not being inferred from the code itself. - Is there some other way to show bubbles that were opened independently, but are actually related in the code? Apart from drawing a specific line and seeing the call graph (which is neat, btw.) - I'm concerned about what happens when a single workspace gets bigger than a single window. - What happens when design (as it often needs to) breaks through neatly defined abstractions, and lines start needing to be drawn all over the place. Can Code Bubbles represent this without driving the programmer insane, and (also) can it represent this in a way which encourages the programmer to see better ways to refactor? - Arbitrary areas and names, in a flat namespace on a flat 2D plane, with no relationships between them, is nice and simple. However, it seems like it would limit you when working with big projects and lots of different, but related, spaces.

jurjenh 17y ago

Its refreshing to see new ideas being implemented well. What makes this particularly interesting is the panning desktop metaphor (which seems to be getting more and more popular) and is quite appropriate for multi-touch screens (think ipad). It would be most interesting to see this idea extended in this manner, and possibly alter it so coding can be done differently. One possible way might be to have a collection of functions available, then link them together to create new functions. In most cases, this could be done using relatively few commands, so could be done on a touch-only screen.

jamesrcole 17y ago

[edit: fixed link] This approach might be conducive to RFS 5: Development on Handhelds (http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html). Bubbles - smaller chunks of information more suitable for a small display Arranged in a spatial layout - fits with the spatial, panning style of the iPhone UI.

LiveTheDream 17y ago

The main benefit of this IDE, compared to terminal stalwarts vim and emacs, is the effective use of a large, high-resolution screen. The color-coding and context grouping is really slick; IMO vim gets a bit visually confusing if you split windows more than twice. My main gripe about this system would be the normal one of moving back and forth between the keyboard and mouse. Also I wonder how sluggish it gets if you have multiple workspaces and debugger sessions open. The alt+drag static call graph was another cool feature. Ultimately, the best tool is the one you know best. Any IDE will have a very tough time competing with 30-odd years of developers perfecting all the small stuff in vim and emacs.

j23tom 17y ago

now apple should sue them - they inveted it first - no doubt ;)

jwr 17y ago

Now if somebody just plugged this into Emacs, or just got me an extensible (Lisp-based) bubble system with SLIME so that I can connect to a Clojure environment and inspect my code…

tlrobinson 17y ago

Did this vaguely remind anyone else of Hugh Jackman's virus writing "IDE" in Swordfish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUJFOuHIS4Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUJFOuHIS4Q And on that note, how come all academic screencasts are so monotonous?

colings86 17y ago

I really like this, although is views seem to lend themselves very much to functional programming as the bubbles in the demo only show the methods of a class and obtaining a view of a class as a whole does not seem to be inherent to the IDE. With functional programming you only care about the functions so maybe that would be an ideal target for this IDE

defdac 17y ago

What I like about Bubbles is that it manages to visualize the program more like how I think graphically. I've never been a text programmer. I see the code in a visual way in my head, far from typing on a keyboard. About the opposite of Emacs/Vim. I seldom remembers the names of classes and methods, but where they are in a code landscape where the code almost have different kind of colours and textures. Negative space and beautifulness of code is important to me, and it has nothing to do with the text itself. The less I need to use a keyboard the better.

mcormier 17y ago

This is very interesting. To me it looks like it creates a hybrid interface experience in between traditional programming and visual programming languages such as Prograph. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph