20 ms·

New year, same old plans

142 points by harperlee 8y ago

newcrobuzon 8y ago
Any idea what happened to Chris Granger and the original LightTable/Eve plans? If I am not mistaken they took some VC money right? How did that work out? Would be really interested to hear their story and lessons learned. Aside from that I was a big LightTable fan and really enjoyed its inline instarepl and other features, so it is definitely great to see that LT is not completely forgotten! Kudos!
- guessmyname 8y ago
  > Any idea what happened to Chris Granger and the original LightTable/Eve plans? The project is dead [1][2] as of Jan 24, 2018. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16227130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16227130 [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/eve-talk/YFguOGkNrBo/EozaCfheAQAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/eve-talk/YFguOGkNrBo/E...
  - newcrobuzon 8y ago
    Thanks! Shame it did not work out, it was an interesting (and inspirational) endeavour.
    - jake-low 8y ago
      I just watched a recording of a talk Chris gave a few months ago. It's a retrospective about building Lighttable/Aurora/Eve. If you were interested in the project(s) I suspect you'll find it interesting. Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT2CMS0MxJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT2CMS0MxJ0 Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThjFFDwOXok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThjFFDwOXok
      - newcrobuzon 8y ago
        Thanks, will definitely watch! LightTable and its instarepl definitely inspired me but as time went I somehow lost track of the project. Inspired by LightTable I even created an instarepl for java and clojure workflows in my pet project (titanoboa.io). So definitely will watch his talks as I might even face similar struggles (albeit in slightly different area/industry).
      - zubairq 8y ago
        I think the Light Table guys inspired many people to work on this stuff. As an investor of LightTable/Eve mentioned in the video I was pretty inspired by these guys too. I am now working on my own Cloud editor, at yazz.com
  - passalong2019 8y ago
    His destiny is to start the same thing from scratch again and again...
    - erikpukinskis 8y ago
      Mine too. But every time I start again it's easier and better, and someday I believe my work will "click". I think the same is true of Chris.
- theothergod 8y ago
  Hi, author of the post here, LightTable is cool, right? Yeah, I'm trying to get the inline code evaluation and instarepl features working on new updates.
  - zimablue 8y ago
    Thanks for doing God's work! How hard would it be to get LT running inside a browser? Also, does it have a headless mode and how hard would that be?
    - theothergod 8y ago
      I'm glad you asked it. It's in my future plan. It shouldn't be much hard. I would like to pursue it after of course getting LT stable(and maybe with some funding).
- panzagl 8y ago
  They took Kickstarter money too.
mortdeus 8y ago
One thing that bothers me about new code editors/IDEs is that their developers really don't do a good enough job researching and deriving inspiration from the editors that already exist. For example, I have yet to find any modern editor that draws inspiration from the brilliantly designed ideas used in Plan 9's 'sam' and 'acme' editors. For example structured regexps, 3 button mouse chording, and the 'plumb' feature thats basically a context-aware, smarter version of a unix pipe between two executables. I mean i can go on and on but another thing that i find absolutely annoying about newer editors is that they all use Webkit as the base of their apps core foundation. This makes it irritating to consider trying to make changes to the code that I believe would overall improve the editor and make it more useful. (at least as far as im concerned) I can literally make a list a mile long of things I like in other editors and wish i could see condensed into one ultimate code editor to supplant all code editors that had come before.
- cpach 8y ago
  It’s been years since I first heard of sam and acme. Perhaps I should try them. Is it possible to run them in MacOS/Linux/Windows? Or perhaps a virtual machine? BTW, does chording work well with mice where one of the ”three” buttons is the scrool wheel?
  - vthriller 8y ago
    Clickable scroll wheel works fine, it is mapped to the same button. I can't, however, imagine left+middle chord on modern laptops, there are not that many laptops (mostly ThinkPads as far as I can tell) that have three physical mouse buttons.
    - mjl- 8y ago
      i'm (happily!) using acme on macos. works great, the option and cmd buttons act as modifiers for middle and left button (execute and search).
  - pmarreck 8y ago
    https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/virtual_machines/index.html https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/virtual_machines/index.html
StavrosK 8y ago
Pratik will be able to talk more definitively about this, but the LightTable project is seeking maintainers. If you'd like to help out, please consider joining Code Shelter[1], this will enable you to join LightTable (after talking with Pratik) and potentially a slew of other projects that need help[2]. [1]: https://www.codeshelter.co/ https://www.codeshelter.co/ [2]: https://www.codeshelter.co/projects/ https://www.codeshelter.co/projects/
- theothergod 8y ago
  Yes, Definitely. Having multiple active maintainers really help to push the project forward.
bartq 8y ago
May be relevant: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MD-CgzODFWzdpnYXr8bEgysfDmb8PDV6iCAjH5JIvaI/preview?slide=id.g1d7c11dd1b_0_348 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MD-CgzODFWzdpnYXr8bE....
barrystaes 8y ago
Back when i learned about Lighttable years ago i found the instant preview and live editing of running code very cool! I just realized thats basically what we already do today: i use WebStorm and my webapp hot-reloads any code i type. If i wanted i could even rewind the app state. And when i enable JS debug in IDE its like inception and matrix-view combined, but surprisingly userfriendly still. To easily try this with just about any IDE check out https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app
- _bxg1 8y ago
  The difference is that LightTable gives you inline previews of individual expressions, not just the final result. This is really nice to have for debugging why the final result isn't what you expected.
pcr910303 8y ago
Maybe starting a flame war, but isn’t this exactly what GNU Emacs & SLIME and for other languages, REPL, LSP/DAP protocols for? While I appreciate his/her effort (I appreciate everything related to developer’s ergonomics), I’m not sure what differentiates lighttable. Maybe I’m missing something? Can anyone explain?
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  I wrote out a long explanation but then I accidentally shook my iPhone while shifting in bed and now it's gone.
  - pmarreck 8y ago
    You can turn off that useless feature btw
  - pcr910303 8y ago
    Actually you could have shook it again and pressed Redo :-( Anyway, thanks for taking your time!
- klibertp 8y ago
  Pretty much the only advantage LT ever had over Emacs was the GUI layer unburdened by decades of development and compatibility with TTYs. In other words, the hope for LT was that it will allow a wide range of scriptable graphical effects. While never explicitly stated, if you read early posts on LT you'll see its feature list is basically 80% Emacs, 10% Smalltalk and 10% eye-candy. Many (five?) years later, from what I gather, LT has the eye-candy - the rest is perpetually "under construction". It would be hard for it to be anything else, though, as the main developers jumped ship a few years back to work on Eve (which, as a karmic retribution for all my crushed hopes for LT, also tanked and died recently). Emacs may be less pretty than newer editors, and lots of its APIs are decades old at this point, but it's still the only self-documenting, easily discoverable and extensible editor this side of Pharo and Squeak, which can be used in practice (due to a giant amount of plugins which bring it up to modern standards) for almost any task. TLDR: LightTable as a powerful editor for programmers is dead - it may be still possible to revive it, but its scope would have to be massively scaled down. It's not going to compete with Emacs & co. anymore, which is a shame, because when it started it had the potential for this.

142 points by harperlee 8y ago

Any idea what happened to Chris Granger and the original LightTable/Eve plans? If I am not mistaken they took some VC money right? How did that work out? Would be really interested to hear their story and lessons learned. Aside from that I was a big LightTable fan and really enjoyed its inline instarepl and other features, so it is definitely great to see that LT is not completely forgotten! Kudos!

guessmyname 8y ago
> Any idea what happened to Chris Granger and the original LightTable/Eve plans? The project is dead [1][2] as of Jan 24, 2018. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16227130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16227130 [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/eve-talk/YFguOGkNrBo/EozaCfheAQAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/eve-talk/YFguOGkNrBo/E...
- newcrobuzon 8y ago
  Thanks! Shame it did not work out, it was an interesting (and inspirational) endeavour.
  - jake-low 8y ago
    I just watched a recording of a talk Chris gave a few months ago. It's a retrospective about building Lighttable/Aurora/Eve. If you were interested in the project(s) I suspect you'll find it interesting. Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT2CMS0MxJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT2CMS0MxJ0 Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThjFFDwOXok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThjFFDwOXok
    - newcrobuzon 8y ago
      Thanks, will definitely watch! LightTable and its instarepl definitely inspired me but as time went I somehow lost track of the project. Inspired by LightTable I even created an instarepl for java and clojure workflows in my pet project (titanoboa.io). So definitely will watch his talks as I might even face similar struggles (albeit in slightly different area/industry).
    - zubairq 8y ago
      I think the Light Table guys inspired many people to work on this stuff. As an investor of LightTable/Eve mentioned in the video I was pretty inspired by these guys too. I am now working on my own Cloud editor, at yazz.com
- passalong2019 8y ago
  His destiny is to start the same thing from scratch again and again...
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    Mine too. But every time I start again it's easier and better, and someday I believe my work will "click". I think the same is true of Chris.
theothergod 8y ago
Hi, author of the post here, LightTable is cool, right? Yeah, I'm trying to get the inline code evaluation and instarepl features working on new updates.
- zimablue 8y ago
  Thanks for doing God's work! How hard would it be to get LT running inside a browser? Also, does it have a headless mode and how hard would that be?
  - theothergod 8y ago
    I'm glad you asked it. It's in my future plan. It shouldn't be much hard. I would like to pursue it after of course getting LT stable(and maybe with some funding).
panzagl 8y ago
They took Kickstarter money too.

mortdeus 8y ago

One thing that bothers me about new code editors/IDEs is that their developers really don't do a good enough job researching and deriving inspiration from the editors that already exist. For example, I have yet to find any modern editor that draws inspiration from the brilliantly designed ideas used in Plan 9's 'sam' and 'acme' editors. For example structured regexps, 3 button mouse chording, and the 'plumb' feature thats basically a context-aware, smarter version of a unix pipe between two executables. I mean i can go on and on but another thing that i find absolutely annoying about newer editors is that they all use Webkit as the base of their apps core foundation. This makes it irritating to consider trying to make changes to the code that I believe would overall improve the editor and make it more useful. (at least as far as im concerned) I can literally make a list a mile long of things I like in other editors and wish i could see condensed into one ultimate code editor to supplant all code editors that had come before.

cpach 8y ago
It’s been years since I first heard of sam and acme. Perhaps I should try them. Is it possible to run them in MacOS/Linux/Windows? Or perhaps a virtual machine? BTW, does chording work well with mice where one of the ”three” buttons is the scrool wheel?
- vthriller 8y ago
  Clickable scroll wheel works fine, it is mapped to the same button. I can't, however, imagine left+middle chord on modern laptops, there are not that many laptops (mostly ThinkPads as far as I can tell) that have three physical mouse buttons.
  - mjl- 8y ago
    i'm (happily!) using acme on macos. works great, the option and cmd buttons act as modifiers for middle and left button (execute and search).
- pmarreck 8y ago
  https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/virtual_machines/index.html https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/virtual_machines/index.html

StavrosK 8y ago

Pratik will be able to talk more definitively about this, but the LightTable project is seeking maintainers. If you'd like to help out, please consider joining Code Shelter[1], this will enable you to join LightTable (after talking with Pratik) and potentially a slew of other projects that need help[2]. [1]: https://www.codeshelter.co/ https://www.codeshelter.co/ [2]: https://www.codeshelter.co/projects/ https://www.codeshelter.co/projects/

theothergod 8y ago
Yes, Definitely. Having multiple active maintainers really help to push the project forward.

bartq 8y ago

May be relevant: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MD-CgzODFWzdpnYXr8bEgysfDmb8PDV6iCAjH5JIvaI/preview?slide=id.g1d7c11dd1b_0_348 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MD-CgzODFWzdpnYXr8bE....

barrystaes 8y ago

Back when i learned about Lighttable years ago i found the instant preview and live editing of running code very cool! I just realized thats basically what we already do today: i use WebStorm and my webapp hot-reloads any code i type. If i wanted i could even rewind the app state. And when i enable JS debug in IDE its like inception and matrix-view combined, but surprisingly userfriendly still. To easily try this with just about any IDE check out https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app

_bxg1 8y ago
The difference is that LightTable gives you inline previews of individual expressions, not just the final result. This is really nice to have for debugging why the final result isn't what you expected.

pcr910303 8y ago

Maybe starting a flame war, but isn’t this exactly what GNU Emacs & SLIME and for other languages, REPL, LSP/DAP protocols for? While I appreciate his/her effort (I appreciate everything related to developer’s ergonomics), I’m not sure what differentiates lighttable. Maybe I’m missing something? Can anyone explain?

erikpukinskis 8y ago
I wrote out a long explanation but then I accidentally shook my iPhone while shifting in bed and now it's gone.
- pmarreck 8y ago
  You can turn off that useless feature btw
- pcr910303 8y ago
  Actually you could have shook it again and pressed Redo :-( Anyway, thanks for taking your time!
klibertp 8y ago
Pretty much the only advantage LT ever had over Emacs was the GUI layer unburdened by decades of development and compatibility with TTYs. In other words, the hope for LT was that it will allow a wide range of scriptable graphical effects. While never explicitly stated, if you read early posts on LT you'll see its feature list is basically 80% Emacs, 10% Smalltalk and 10% eye-candy. Many (five?) years later, from what I gather, LT has the eye-candy - the rest is perpetually "under construction". It would be hard for it to be anything else, though, as the main developers jumped ship a few years back to work on Eve (which, as a karmic retribution for all my crushed hopes for LT, also tanked and died recently). Emacs may be less pretty than newer editors, and lots of its APIs are decades old at this point, but it's still the only self-documenting, easily discoverable and extensible editor this side of Pharo and Squeak, which can be used in practice (due to a giant amount of plugins which bring it up to modern standards) for almost any task. TLDR: LightTable as a powerful editor for programmers is dead - it may be still possible to revive it, but its scope would have to be massively scaled down. It's not going to compete with Emacs & co. anymore, which is a shame, because when it started it had the potential for this.