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Perhaps, but it's pretty easy to make judgements from the sideline about what people should or shouldn't do. I was the PM on Visual Studio. I can assure the th

Perhaps, but it's pretty easy to make judgements from the sideline about what people should or shouldn't do. I was the PM on Visual Studio. I can assure the things I showed in Light Table weren't there. Nor were they in Eclipse, as I studied that as well. You can pick and choose any number of things from our work over the years and say "Hey, but this looks like that" - I'm sure it does, but the question is does it work like that? Does it enable you the way the things we showed did? > Light Table was also ultimately abandoned before completion. Unfortunately even after paying ourselves only just enough to live in the area (around 40% of what my peers were paid), we needed to find a way to eat. No software is ever done, but we had more than 40,000 people using it and Light Table was a stated influence on tools at Apple, Google, and Microsoft. We did our best. Was there more to do? Of course, there always is, but at some point we had to make the hard decision to leave LT in the hands of the community. I'm curious what direction you think we should've gone instead? > Perhaps Granger should rein in his ambitions somewhat Maybe, but at the same time, we had people willing to let us try. You paid literally nothing for access to our work, nor to the effects our research had on others, so I'm not sure why there's this much negativity here. We need people testing the fringes because where we are is so far from where we could be. Lots of things did work in Eve and there were cases where we were so much more efficient it hardly felt like we were "programming" at all anymore. We've shared everything we've done and we'll continue telling more people about it in the hope that others can benefit from what we've learned. And yet you're the one acting hurt, while I'm the one having to shutdown the project. That's very different from the HN that rallied us to do our kickstarter in the first place - the one that encouraged innovation and trying to do crazy things in the off chance that they work. There's so much more to do and I sincerely hope HN doesn't become so cynical and demeaning that it's not worth sharing people's efforts here.

j4ship 9y ago
hes basing it on evidence ... weather its easy or not (its an opinion, im not sure what the ease or difficulty of the statment matters) it seems accurate. Maybe some counter evidence like your knowledge of how hard he/the team works? They try they failed ... and op is suggesting get some wins under your belt first. I dont things hes "acting hurt". You are acting hurt, and taking a criticism personally instead of for what it is. A reasonable statement. This makes me see why the project failed ... surrounded by yes men that cant see the flaw and are focused on things like "how many people use it" rather than "why would anyone pay for this" classic
azhenley 9y ago
Graduate school is a great place for "people testing the fringes." My experimental code editor design, Patchworks [1], is one such example. P.S. I'm a big fan of your work! Looking forward to hearing about your next project. [1] http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N84177 http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N84177
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  > Graduate school is a great place for "people testing the fringes." Testing, yes, but not exploring. Grad school gives you one experiment and then you have to start publishing. So if you have something you want to try out, with a direct implementation strategy and a clear set of possible outcomes, then you can do that at grad school. If you want to try many things and iterate, grad school will not work well. You will be expected to publish digestible “learnings”, and so you will end up skewing your work towards ideas that are likely to produce compelling presentations. There’s no good place to experiment, in either the corporate or academic world. Your best bet is to move between many domains, trying small ideas in context while also delivering value, and only ever doing your real Hail Mary experiments at home on your own dime.
  - lazyasciiart 9y ago
    Isn't the freedom from short term value basically the concept behind tenure?
    - erikpukinskis 9y ago
      If you don’t care if you have anyone in your lab, and you don’t have any expenses, you’re pretty free as a tenured faculty. But if you want students, you need to find grants for them. And if you need materials/travel/services/etc for your research that’ll require grants too.
m_mueller 9y ago
I’m kinda surprised Apple or MS didn’t jusy acquire or acquihire you by now. Especially the influence on Swift/playgrounds seems obvious.
justAnotherNET 9y ago
Why I come to HN: it’s like a more skilled reddit and the topic of the snarky top post shows up to lay some truth bombs. Not gonna lie, I kind of look forward to/loath the idea of my work showing up here.
necubi 9y ago
For whatever it's worth, I backed light table on kickstarter and as far as I'm concerned it was well worth the money. I got an interesting prototype editor which has had a big impact on the wider ecosystem (the swift playground comes particularly to mind). I've gotten to read your consistently interesting blog and watch you experiment with different pieces of the language design space. I can't imagine how hard it must be to shut it down after all these years, but I know whatever comes next in PL and IDE design will owe your project a huge debt. Thank you for everything!
didibus 9y ago
I'm happy for all the work you've put out, and I agree we need to try and experiment more and innovate, and so I found Eve was a more interesting experiment. That said LightTable had more potential for success and impact. I still dream for a more polished and full featured LightTable editor. A Jupyter notebook on steroid usable for generalized programming. ProtoREPL in Atom has picked up some of it, but overall there's just not the man resources behind any of these to really flesh them out and that's sad.
steelmanning 9y ago
> And yet you're the one acting hurt, while I'm the one having to shutdown the project. That's very different from the HN that rallied us to do our kickstarter in the first place - the one that encouraged innovation and trying to do crazy things in the off chance that they work. Why not try to gradually evolve an existing language or IDE into what you envision, rather than starting completely from scratch? And sorry if I came across as overly snarky and dismissive; that wasn't my intention.
BorisVSchmid 9y ago
Still using Light Table as my favorite light-weight IDE. I hope things like https://clojuriststogether.org/ https://clojuriststogether.org/ or possibly patreon will make clojure open source projects more sustainable for developers.

j4ship 9y ago

hes basing it on evidence ... weather its easy or not (its an opinion, im not sure what the ease or difficulty of the statment matters) it seems accurate. Maybe some counter evidence like your knowledge of how hard he/the team works? They try they failed ... and op is suggesting get some wins under your belt first. I dont things hes "acting hurt". You are acting hurt, and taking a criticism personally instead of for what it is. A reasonable statement. This makes me see why the project failed ... surrounded by yes men that cant see the flaw and are focused on things like "how many people use it" rather than "why would anyone pay for this" classic

azhenley 9y ago

Graduate school is a great place for "people testing the fringes." My experimental code editor design, Patchworks [1], is one such example. P.S. I'm a big fan of your work! Looking forward to hearing about your next project. [1] http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N84177 http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N84177

erikpukinskis 9y ago
> Graduate school is a great place for "people testing the fringes." Testing, yes, but not exploring. Grad school gives you one experiment and then you have to start publishing. So if you have something you want to try out, with a direct implementation strategy and a clear set of possible outcomes, then you can do that at grad school. If you want to try many things and iterate, grad school will not work well. You will be expected to publish digestible “learnings”, and so you will end up skewing your work towards ideas that are likely to produce compelling presentations. There’s no good place to experiment, in either the corporate or academic world. Your best bet is to move between many domains, trying small ideas in context while also delivering value, and only ever doing your real Hail Mary experiments at home on your own dime.
- lazyasciiart 9y ago
  Isn't the freedom from short term value basically the concept behind tenure?
  - erikpukinskis 9y ago
    If you don’t care if you have anyone in your lab, and you don’t have any expenses, you’re pretty free as a tenured faculty. But if you want students, you need to find grants for them. And if you need materials/travel/services/etc for your research that’ll require grants too.

m_mueller 9y ago

I’m kinda surprised Apple or MS didn’t jusy acquire or acquihire you by now. Especially the influence on Swift/playgrounds seems obvious.

justAnotherNET 9y ago

Why I come to HN: it’s like a more skilled reddit and the topic of the snarky top post shows up to lay some truth bombs. Not gonna lie, I kind of look forward to/loath the idea of my work showing up here.

necubi 9y ago

For whatever it's worth, I backed light table on kickstarter and as far as I'm concerned it was well worth the money. I got an interesting prototype editor which has had a big impact on the wider ecosystem (the swift playground comes particularly to mind). I've gotten to read your consistently interesting blog and watch you experiment with different pieces of the language design space. I can't imagine how hard it must be to shut it down after all these years, but I know whatever comes next in PL and IDE design will owe your project a huge debt. Thank you for everything!

didibus 9y ago

I'm happy for all the work you've put out, and I agree we need to try and experiment more and innovate, and so I found Eve was a more interesting experiment. That said LightTable had more potential for success and impact. I still dream for a more polished and full featured LightTable editor. A Jupyter notebook on steroid usable for generalized programming. ProtoREPL in Atom has picked up some of it, but overall there's just not the man resources behind any of these to really flesh them out and that's sad.

steelmanning 9y ago

> And yet you're the one acting hurt, while I'm the one having to shutdown the project. That's very different from the HN that rallied us to do our kickstarter in the first place - the one that encouraged innovation and trying to do crazy things in the off chance that they work. Why not try to gradually evolve an existing language or IDE into what you envision, rather than starting completely from scratch? And sorry if I came across as overly snarky and dismissive; that wasn't my intention.

BorisVSchmid 9y ago

Still using Light Table as my favorite light-weight IDE. I hope things like https://clojuriststogether.org/ https://clojuriststogether.org/ or possibly patreon will make clojure open source projects more sustainable for developers.