4 ms·

The most enjoyable programming experience I've ever had, hands-down, was writing Clojure in LightTable, an IDE that allowed line-by-line inspection/execution, w

The most enjoyable programming experience I've ever had, hands-down, was writing Clojure in LightTable, an IDE that allowed line-by-line inspection/execution, which sounds like what you're talking about. The project looks like it died unfortunately, but I think they did end up adding Python support before that happened. Might be worth checking out.

RandomWorker 4y ago
I believe this is called the REPL driven development in Clojure, when ever you are writing code you have the REPL available and it’s one of the main selling points of Clojure. My opinion is that I get very close of this REPL style with a notebook and (right click on notebook tab in Jupyter lab) open console for notebook. This opens a REPL (iphython console) alongside the notebook. The you can code all kinds of Clojure stylistic Python ways using nested dictionaries. You have to make sure to copy paste you finished code into the notebook or other .py file not to loose it, but it’s minor.
- nmfisher 4y ago
  I've been doing the same thing in VS Code for Julia/Python, but the experience is much worse than LightTable [0]. It's slow, the interface is clunky/janky, and noone has invested effort in designing the UI to make navigation/information clear and accessible. [0] Admittedly LightTable was pretty buggy so it wasn't all fun and games. But still - I would love for my day-to-day development environment (Dart/C++) to look like that.
dgb23 4y ago
That functionality and more is available for the most common editors/IDEs: VSCode Calva, Emacs Cider, Intellij Cursive. You can also write notebooks with clerk, which gives you a whole bunch of data visualization utility and renders to a browser (via websockets). Also has a static html export. Cool thing here it’s that it uses just normal Clojure files, so all your tooling just works.
- nmfisher 4y ago
  That's cool, I knew about Cider but not Cursive/Calva (I haven't used Clojure in years). I would love for this to be more common for other languages (F# in particular would really benefit, IMO).
mark_l_watson 4y ago
LightTable was indeed very cool when I tried it. There is a Haskell IDE available in the MacOS Apple Store than has a similar live view feature. I don’t much use this IDE, but it is cool.

RandomWorker 4y ago

I believe this is called the REPL driven development in Clojure, when ever you are writing code you have the REPL available and it’s one of the main selling points of Clojure. My opinion is that I get very close of this REPL style with a notebook and (right click on notebook tab in Jupyter lab) open console for notebook. This opens a REPL (iphython console) alongside the notebook. The you can code all kinds of Clojure stylistic Python ways using nested dictionaries. You have to make sure to copy paste you finished code into the notebook or other .py file not to loose it, but it’s minor.

nmfisher 4y ago
I've been doing the same thing in VS Code for Julia/Python, but the experience is much worse than LightTable [0]. It's slow, the interface is clunky/janky, and noone has invested effort in designing the UI to make navigation/information clear and accessible. [0] Admittedly LightTable was pretty buggy so it wasn't all fun and games. But still - I would love for my day-to-day development environment (Dart/C++) to look like that.

dgb23 4y ago

That functionality and more is available for the most common editors/IDEs: VSCode Calva, Emacs Cider, Intellij Cursive. You can also write notebooks with clerk, which gives you a whole bunch of data visualization utility and renders to a browser (via websockets). Also has a static html export. Cool thing here it’s that it uses just normal Clojure files, so all your tooling just works.

nmfisher 4y ago
That's cool, I knew about Cider but not Cursive/Calva (I haven't used Clojure in years). I would love for this to be more common for other languages (F# in particular would really benefit, IMO).

mark_l_watson 4y ago

LightTable was indeed very cool when I tried it. There is a Haskell IDE available in the MacOS Apple Store than has a similar live view feature. I don’t much use this IDE, but it is cool.