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LightTable detailed critique: Concept vs Reality

193 points by pdeva1 14y ago

Swizec 14y ago
I agree with most of the points - documentation is well covered by IDE's, yep, I guess (don't use IDE's myself) ... finding functions is also pretty solved (personally I just use grep). But I disagree with the part about small functions and the example being contrived because real world functions aren't small and you can't just get your output directly like that. First of all, functions should be small. Anything you can unit test, you can put in this sort of instant feedback. It's basically just a unit test! Input goes in, output comes out. Without side-effects or other horrors. Okay, so not all functions make sense to be unit tested. Sometimes you need an integration test and the function can't have direct output like that ... you have integration tests don't you? Why not just evolve the "Instant feedback" feature to being your set of tests? I honestly don't care about much else in the LightTable demo. But I love the idea of instant feedback. Especially when working with Haskell or something.
- rabbidrabbit 14y ago
  Instant feedback is what makes LightTable the great concept it is.
- spuz 14y ago
  As he says in the article, functions should be small but real world code isn't always written the way you'd want it to be. I think instant feedback would be great for understanding a piece of code that I didn't write but the chances are that if I don't understand it it is probably badly factored with large function sizes and mixed responsibilities all over the place. Ultimately there will be code for which this feature is useful and code for which it is not. I can't say I wouldn't want it to be in my IDE's bag of tools though.
  - tluyben2 14y ago
    It should be annoying as possible to write/read long functions. I don't know why IDE's/editors make it so easy to write 500 line functions; it's always bad. I interview over 10 programmers/day and function size is a huge filter; you recognize crappy programmers fast that way.
- feiern 14y ago
  I think the author did not really get the motivation behind the LightTable concept. For those interested, it was this talk that inspired the guy(s): http://vimeo.com/36579366 http://vimeo.com/36579366 It's about the instant feedback during development as opposed to the classic change/compile/reload cycle. Especially for concepts it's important to understand the intention rather than picking on it point-by-point (which in itself, while true for the most part, seems rather pedantic to me).
  - Swizec 14y ago
    Honestly, I've been aching for this to become a reality ever since I saw that talk.
camperman 14y ago
"Since I am a Java guy and the IDE concepts are defined as being language agnostic and that support for additional languages can be added later, I will compare the examples using Java code and Eclipse as the IDE." And you end up proving nothing more than Java isn't a dynamic language where everything is available to you all the time without recompiling - and therefore won't really fit into to LightTable very well. The examples in LightTable are not contrived as you call them - people using dynamic programming environments work with instant feedback like this all the time.
- Uchikoma 14y ago
  I'd like to learn how a dynamic language here is different from "static" language like Scala. Care to explain?
  - quadhome 14y ago
    Dynamic programming environment. Not dynamic language. See: SLIME http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B_4vhsmRRI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B_4vhsmRRI
    - Uchikoma 14y ago
      Thx.
iamgopal 14y ago
I had an idea of creating IDE which frees developer from organizing files and functions etc. Every class definition and functions will be stored in CodeDB. Compiler/Interpreter talks to CodeDB to resolve. Controller seats in the middle and talking to All three, developer, CodeDB and compiler. Maybe I should create concept demo/video/image of it.
- Uchikoma 14y ago
  Smalltalk?
- spooneybarger 14y ago
  You should check out a Smalltalk environment that isn't Gnu Smalltalk or Redline Smalltalk, neither of which currently has the full Smalltalk IDE experience. "Pharo By Example" would be a good starting point. If you are interested, feel free to email me, I'm quite happy to introduce people to what a Smalltalk environment has to offer so they can take it back to their day to day and start to spread the ideas.
jsmcgd 14y ago
This critique seems to be analogous to a low level language programmer dismissing the benefits of a high level language because both are Turing complete. Yes both IDEs may be able to do similar things, but it's the immediacy with which you can do them which sets them apart. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
- zerostar07 14y ago
  You gave the answer yourself: if you want to make programmers more productive build a higher level language, not an IDE. IMHO IDEs are overrated. If any process can be automated, it will eventually end up in code, not in a GUI. [disclaimer: i dont use any IDE)
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    These days, the IDE is apart of the language; we will see more languages that push integration with their IDE in as much as Smalltalk did in the past. No one would think about using a language without a compiler, developers increasingly feel the same way about the IDE.
  - gnaritas 14y ago
    Your critique is off the mark. IDE can do things that make no sense as a language feature but help you write code very fast. Command keys for things like show me all senders of this method, show me all references to this class, show me all implementations of this method, show me all inheritors of this method, go to the definition of this thing, show me a tree of the class hierarchy, rename this method fixing all senders, extract this code into a new method, extract these methods into a new superclass, push these methods up or down in the hierarchy. These are things IDE's can do for you to enable you to code much faster by being aware of the structure of the language rather than editing everything as streams of text. I work in sublime text 2 doing ruby code, and I miss the hell out of these Smalltalk IDE features, text editors just can't compare; they're great at slinging text, but I don't want to sling text, I want to sling around semantically relevant chunks of code in ways that don't break it automatically.
sirn 14y ago
> Even if it were somehow to ignore api calls that say, modify your filesystem, how would the IDE 'know' about that api. Will someone have to manually go through all the apis in existence and make a list of which ones to emulate and which ones to not? That doesn't seem practical. Why do Light Table need to emulate something? People have been executing code in REPL since forever, Light Table instant feedback seems like an extension to the REPL concept, with an ability to substitute all variables visually in-place. I can't see why it should be any different.
- lemming 14y ago
  Because when you execute code in a REPL you choose when to do so, presumably because you understand the side effects. The IDE doesn't but has to execute the code anyway to give you the feedback. This might be useful for pure functions but you'd need some kind of integrated mocking functionality for impure code.
GlennS 14y ago
I'm a bit unconvinced about the 'language agnostic' assumption. For Java, you want to get the most out of your static typing. So, you need an IDE filled with analysis tools. For dynamically typed languages, Eclipse doesn't cut it. It gets sluggish and crashes too often and that's not acceptable when your language is designed for rapid feedback. I want something that gives me feedback as if I were using Firebug, but feels like I'm typing into Notepad++, and it seems like LightTable could fill that need. My thinking is that Light Table will live or die by how responsive it feels.
twelvechairs 14y ago
Of course the original video was not perfect. It is a concept, not a fully fleshed out product. It piqued peoples interest for good reason, because of a combination of many ideas working together in a clean interface. To criticise it for details ('this takes up half the screen', 'some of these things have been done before', 'this particular feature might not work for the kinds of work I do') is to entirely miss the point of a 'concept'. It needs constructive input (eg. 'this is a good idea, but would work better if done like that'). The kind of criticism provided here doesn't help anyone much at all.
- web_chops 14y ago
  I wonder if this is one of the reasons we are stuck with crappy development tools in era of slick iPads. Not only do we balk at the amount being raised (also happened with ruby.app), we also tend to criticize any thing that looks new and trying to change status quo. At the worst this will be a half baked IDE while still offering some creative features paving way for (hopefully) better future IDEs. You don't see many people haring off to criticize other creative projects the same way outside programming world.
- Someone 14y ago
  Yes, but most, if not all, of the concept has been done before. Given that, I think the question why things would work better this time is one that the backers of this project should think about before starting development. My input would be that I think the cute displays in the video will not work on real-scale projects. One reason is that I do not see how the most interesting part, the live display of a call graph, will work as nicely as displayed in the video with: - functions that manipulate disk or network state - large functions - deeply nested functions, in particular recursive ones I can envision each of them, but all in a somewhat ugly way. The first would require programmers to write set-up and tear-down code; the second and third would eat screen real estate and/or would involve scrolling and/or collapsing. If you have to write that setup and teardown code, I do not see how this interactive way of testing code is that much better than writing unit tests. Translating that into constructive feedback: I would aim for building a good tool for education first; then, work on the scaling problem. But, be prepared: you should be happy if you get the education part only; you may not find a way to scale this up to real-world projects. And you should also realize beforehand that, if this does not scale, the educational program may be seen as a toy, only useful in the first half-year or so, only because 'real programmers' do not use it. It may take time to overcome that, just like it took (or even: is taking) time to overcome the notion that real programmers do not use IDEs. [Going on a tangent: I would love to have a system that allowed me to split unit tests into API examples and all the other tests (timing tests, integration tests specific to certain bugs, etc.) That way, the documentation system could grab the first kind of tests and show them in the documentation. I also would like to see a system that forbid me to write code that is not covered by a unit test yet. For example, in C, it would force programmers to write the header file first, the unit tests exercising part of the code second, and the actual code last. It should allow me to write the whole header file, then implement and test that header in parts, though. I also might hate it the moment I see it, but I need to see it to discover that.]
kenneth 14y ago
You're comparing Java to Clojure. Conceptually, they're insanely different--Apple and Oranges, really. Clojure, Lisp, and similar languages are homoiconic. That means they're beautifully suited to an interactive environment such as that provided by LightTable. Conceptually, unlike typical IDEs, LightTable is not a series of scripts that will attempt to help you deal with common development tasks such as looking up documentation and refactoring. Instead, you're interacting directly with the language. I think it's quite telling that in Java, documentation is done through Javadoc comments, which are ignored by the compiler and sought out by a completely separate tool in order to build docs. In Clojure, documentation is part of the homoiconic code itself: (defn my-fn "This is the documentation, can be inspected on the fly" [] …) Instead of being a series of very reliable hacks on top of a language that doesn't support docs, docs are part of the environment. Additionally, when programming in Clojure, you can do it interactively by modifying the environment on the fly. This was popularized by smalltalk, and is an extremely gratifying way to program: you can inspect and edit your program code while it's running, and have a fully-featured REPL into your program. This way of doing things blows GDB completely out of the water. Note also that when coding functionally, files are often made up of many small single-purpose functions, which is actually much more maintainable than the example "real-world use case" function you provided. Essentially, your entire argument is based around the assumption that Java is the right set of design patterns. I would argue that the Java language is deeply flawed, and leads to a 30:1 ratio of boilerplate code, markup, and structure to useful code. It's what makes Javadoc and IDE refactoring tools possible, but it's also what makes Java a nightmare to maintain and (for me) an extremely unpleasant language to work in. I have never used LightTable, but for me, what it represents is a different way of thinking about programming. It's about interacting with your code directly and interactively. And actually, when writing Clojure, I often program in quite a similar fashion with existing tools (VimClojure / Clojure.tmbundle / Cake).
- dibbeke 14y ago
  Java's annotations could be seen as 'part of the environment' (whatever that may mean). I often use annotations which indicate how a method should be used, and those annotations are used by static analysis to validate correctness. When using Java, I often change my program while it is running. recompiling classes on the fly. It works in most cases, and when it doesn't work, I believe other languages would fail as well. You say Java is deeply flawed. I argue that Java is one of the most successful languages around nowadays. It does what it is designed to do: be relatively easy to learn, a natural successor to C++ with a wide range of libraries. Yes, Java code can often be verbose, but this depends greatly on the kind of paradigms used. I can write verbose and ugly code in Clojure and write relatively concise and elegant code in Java. It depends on architecture, a good understanding of OOP (and its limitations), composition over inheritance. The problem with Java is the sheer amount of 'bad' code written in it (because of all the leagues of beginner programmers), giving it a bad name. Have you seen Clojure code of a large product (equivalent to around 1M code lines of Java), produced by a team of diverse programmers and maintained by another team during a 10 year lifespan? You would cringe just as hard. Finally, lighttable is a proof-of-concept... It's not there yet; there are no reviews; leagues of smart engineers have tried to reproduce something similar and could not escape the POC phase at all.
Rage 14y ago
Eclipse as a good ide ? mpprfrffrt
- andos 14y ago
  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." That's the blog of a company that makes a tool that integrates with Eclipse.
  - dibbeke 14y ago
    Ah, another ad hominem! Let me reply with an ad hominem: Would you translate your statement into: "It is difficult to get Prashant Deva to understand something, when the salary of Prashant Deva depends upon his not understanding it"? No? Then don't make your senseless statement. Please argue his statement instead. Or, maybe you're not a computer scientist, because you're not able to comprehend and participate in a normal discussion?
    - Rage 14y ago
      Well, Eclipse is slow, crashes, has a lot of features but doesn't really do anything nicely (javadoc integration is damn awful tu use). More features doesn't mean better. What i like about LighTables is that it seems to have few features, but do them well. It has a nice clean UI (even if it's just mockup, i don't think it needs anything else) and the UX seems nice too from what i understood. Maybe what you didn't understood is that it's NOT an IDE for computer scientists : it's more aimed to visual programmer, webdev, or gamedev, creativecoders. People that want to do both design and coding. BTW : i just trashed Eclipse, not anyone. I still use it because it's still the best ide for javacoding (even if i haven't done any in a while), which, to me, isn't really flattering for the state of coding IDEs.
      - dibbeke 14y ago
        Eclipse needs a good amount of memory and recently, unfortunately, has a tendency to crash. Most of the features can be disabled; the UI can be reconfigured to your liking. Btw, I generally disable the javadoc view and just F3 to the location to see the code and docs together (docs are often wrong anyways). The problem with mockups is that they haven't touched reality yet: there is always so much detail you don't see at the start.
blahbap 14y ago
There is definetely room for an IDE that is more intuitive and slick than Eclipse - I find Eclipse's many views and modes distracting. Perhaps Light Table is not a revolution of IDEs, but it is certainly a welcome leap in the evolution.
ABS 14y ago
classic example of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Many of the other comments explain why.
zacharyvoase 14y ago
I find this 'critique' (it's not a critique, it's a takedown) to run against the spirit of Hacker News. Someone built a concept showing how the experience of writing code, for their corner of the software ecosystem, could be improved. They found popular support, and they're now setting about to make that concept happen. Congratulations; this is what Hacker News is supposed to be all about. And here's someone summarily piecing apart and nitpicking on that concept (and the details of the demo video) for no apparent reason—there's no feedback or suggestions for improvement, it's just saying "well Eclipse does this and this and this already". I'm not impressed.
- shadowmint 14y ago
  yes! So this. I agree; Let's see some constructive criticism and ideas for how to improve the LightTable idea, instead of just trying to shoot it down as 'not novel'.
  - rweba 14y ago
    Parenthetically, I get rather irritated with people who like to criticize everything as "not novel." Depending on how you look at it almost nothing is completely "novel" ("nothing new under the sun" and all that). What is important is the execution and new wrinkles in the CURRENT iteration - NOT whether something vaguely or even pretty similar was attempted or proposed at some point in the past.
  - prospero 14y ago
    There is a valid point lurking in there. The instant evaluation model doesn't play nicely with side-effects. Exactly where side-effects occur can be difficult to determine, there's no simple way to work around this. This is less of a problem in Clojure, thanks to its immutable data structures, but they're not a panacea. I'm also not sure how well this would work in JS and Python, the other languages that Light Table intends to initially target. One possible solution is to have hooks into side-effects: you could display console output or logging alongside the instant evaluation. The real difficulty is network communication: even if you're okay with actually sending requests over the wire, there's an awkward balance between visibility and generality. Something like libpcap [1] is very general, but gives minimal insight into the content. Hooking into a particular HTTP client library gives you a lot more visibility into what's going on, but you'll need to do this every time you want to use a new library. [1] http://www.tcpdump.org/ http://www.tcpdump.org/
shadowmint 14y ago
Don't agree with everything the author has to say (particularly functions) but I think it's fair criticism. LightTable isn't going to be a great fit for some languages, specifically c, c#, java and c++ style languages; I'm extremely dubious you'll be able to get the sort 'instant feedback' shown in the demo for that sort of compiled complex language with cyclic dependencies (A imports B imports C, imports A. Yay, java... :P). ...but really, that's not what it's targeting. So, fair criticism to the author I feel: don't complain you won't be able to use a hammer to cut down a tree.
daniel_solano 14y ago
Is the demo a bit contrived? Sure, but it's an inspired vision that was whipped up inside of a week. I don't think the creator has any illusions that making the vision a reality will be easy. However, it is clear that this vision is inspiring to a lot of developers and has some traction.
richardk 14y ago
Also even if the code were indeed based on just basic numerical or string primitives, how would the 'instant feedback' work if the code were in a long, tight loop or did heavy cpu intensive stuff? I think this is a critical point, has the author of LightTable considered what would happen with instant feedback for less trivial pieces of code? Besides that, I think this critique is fair, because honestly when I saw LightTable, it seemed like smoke and mirrors. I have a friend quietly writing an innovative new text editor, I expect it will be more 'ground-breaking' than LightTable, but I don't see him trying to take everybody's money.
- Zak 14y ago
  I think this is a critical point, has the author of LightTable considered what would happen with instant feedback for less trivial pieces of code? Some of the code in his demo talked to the web framework he wrote (that I use in production code) and IIRC to the SQL abstraction layer he wrote (that I also use in production code). Something makes me think that he has given some thought to how these things might interact with the real world. I think it's fair to ask for money. Chris Granger has a track record of building useful, production-worthy libraries and tools both professionally and as a hobby. If he's going to not work for a while, possibly hire other people and build an open source IDE, it's reasonable to ask for outside funding.
  - richardk 14y ago
    I'm not sure about others, but I wouldn't give my money to any software project that didn't describe in detail how it might overcome such glaring design challenges.
    - Zak 14y ago
      You seem to be focused on the instant feedback and stack display issues. Instant feedback is not meaningfully different from a REPL in this respect. It is unlikely you would type imperative things like "delete this directory" in to a source file. You might define a cleanup function that deletes files, but it would be pretty unusual to call it at the toplevel unless you were intentionally using the code buffer as a REPL. I'll grant that immediate evaluation of such things might be a little dangerous, but Clojure, though the JVM does have mechanisms to dangerous things like file IO. Stack display seems like an easier problem to solve: only display a certain depth, or just put a scroll bar on it. It doesn't matter how much stuff there is as long as you're looking at the part you're likely to want by default. I think the one downfall of this project as currently envisioned might be that this is a great concept for Clojure and perhaps some other functional languages. It could be good for JS if written in a mostly functional style. Python is a little less functional and is commonly used for scripts, which wouldn't play as nicely with instant feedback. Scripts are distinct from applications or daemons in that they normally contain a sequence of imperative actions that they evaluate and then quit. They might not define any functions at all. Applications and daemons typically run code from an entry point like a main() function. LightTable seems to be designed with Clojure in mind, and Clojure was not designed with scripts in mind.
edanm 14y ago
Everyone is jumping in to disagree with the OP. I have to be honest: I thought the OP's points were very well made, and as much as I loved the LightTable demo, I think I immediately dismissed it, in my mind, as "looks cool, but can't be made". I think there is a big disconnect between this author, a "working programmer" who actually writes code, and at least some of the commenters in this thread. Let me give my take on a few of the differences: For one thing, the op mentioned that, while functions should be small, they usually aren't. And while functions, ideally, should be self-contained, most of the code people write is a mixture of calls to external sources, libraries, etc. I.e., things that can't be seen ahead of time. In practice, the OP is 100% correct. Most of the code I see, ends up being exactly this kind of code. I question whether anyone who claims otherwise has any experience with real systems. I just can't imagine anyone disagreeing that most code looks like this in the real world. Another point of disconnect is the "I don't use an IDE" theme that's common here. I think you'll find that HNers, as a whole, are a lot more prone to be anti-IDE. Much of the "real world" programmers would be shocked that so many HNers give up the comfort of all that the IDE provides. And, at least to my mind, there is an attitude here that using an IDE makes you a worse programmer. The truth is, the author is correct to point out that a lot of the cool stuff in the demo already exists. If for no other reason than to point out that, if you think a lot of the cool stuff shown in the demo is worth looking into, you might want to check out Eclipse or other IDEs. Finally, let me make one final point, specifically to zacharyvoase and the others who think this post is "against the spirit of Hacker News", etc. I totally understand you, and I agree, the LightTable creator deserves a lot of credit for what he's trying to do, whether successful or not. But I think that a critique of the project, especially showing which parts of it have already been created, is amazingly beneficial. No, the OP did not offer many suggestions. But I imagine that, if the LightTable group did not know about some of the things that Eclipse does already, this post will help them out. And this post will certainly get them thinking about whether some of what they demoed is possible. In fact, if it were me running the LightTable project, I might decide to start with an MVP of building LightTable as an Eclipse plugin, to check out some of their concepts. Edit: P.S. I shouldn't have to give "credentials" for expressing a view on HN, but I will anyway. I've been programming professionally for 8 years, and I now run a freelance/consulting software company so have seen many codebases. More importantly, I'm an IDE and editor nut. Most of the start of my career was on Visual Studio, then SlickEdit, and since then I've tried out many IDEs and editors. I now mostly use Vim, while sometimes dropping into SublimeText. I think Eclipse is an amazing tool, and couldn't imagine programming Java without it. I think most people here would be absolutely amazed at the help Eclipse gives in writing Java code, which I'm sure gives many programmers a huge boost in their time to code.
rjurney 14y ago
Java is an Integrated Develompment Environment scripting language that is incompatible with Light Table.
6ren 14y ago
Apart from a sparser screen, the heart is "instant feedback". There are challenges in scaling this up from the demo, but I want to see what can be done - it's Research and Development, not simple implementation. Chris Granger has a solid background for this (on the Visual Studio team). And working code. :-) IMHO there are obviously solutions to these problems, but I'm not sure how graceful/usable they'll be. Maybe great; maybe just a significant improvement; maybe just good for some niche cases - we'll see! Firstly, we can sandbox - including the file-system; even make a copy, so it runs without "really" changing anything (in the limit, there's virtualization). Second, some of these problems are common to testing, where mocking is a standard solution to the same problem of wanting to run just some code. [Perhaps a significant result will be a way of auto-mocking?] And even if you don't Test, you still run code to see if it's working - this is the same; just faster. How do you control what code you run? Light Table can incorporate the same techniques. OTOH, I run code with ctrl-tab, up-arrow + return. It's pretty fast. Easing the setup of that would be good though. The full version is not going be as magical as the demo; but it seems unlikely that current IDE tech has reached perfection, and cannot be improved upon...
jroseattle 14y ago
I find the OP to be off-base in critique of the LightTable concept. To be sure, the concept has some likely drawbacks and would need real-world application to gauge viability, but I thought the critique by comparison to Eclipse missed the point. If there is anything that good design has taught us, it's that doing things better has significantly greater value than simply doing more things. For example, the first comparative in this critique is the "docs everywhere" feature. The OP shows that the LightTable concept "eats up half the screen", "can't resize", etc. while showing that Eclipse has the same feature (with the javadoc tab at the bottom of the screen.) The OP sees documentation show up in both places, so it's called a wash/irrelevant. When I view those same two screenshots, I see a significant difference. In Eclipse, I see yet another tab/doc/thingy with information crammed in it; in LightTable, I see information displayed in parallel with the code, not having to compete for screen space. The OP's comment about documentation "eating up half the screen size" implies that more information on the screen is better than less information. I find the LightTable design in this scenario as saying some information is more important than others. It's mostly just aesthetics, but aesthetics is kind of the point behind LightTable.
gfodor 14y ago
Nobody said it was going to be easy. Where's the author's imagination? My guess is it was slowly killed by working inside of Java for many years.
pbreit 14y ago
The OP comes off as a jerk, mistakenly claiming that Light Table was presented as "game-changing" or "revolutionary, outright dismissive of things that "were done 10 years ago" and, worst of all, critiquing in detail something that doesn't even exist.
NathanRice 14y ago
I don't much care for trendiness or bandwagon hopping, but there are a few things about lighttable clearly hit on the future of computing (though quite by accident, I imagine). First, programs and databases will grow together continuously. The missing piece of the puzzle here is that currently most people view databases as a single correct representation of the world, and assume that whether you have an acid database or a nosql solution, all transactions must eventually be reconciled, and a single truth must emerge. This is patently false. In actuality, database systems will begin to resemble distributed version control systems very closely over the next five to eight years, until they are almost indistinguishable. The two will meet in the middle as all distributed revision control systems end up using off the shelf graph database systems, and these graph database systems incorporate additional functionality to support one them. At some point most editors will be capable of speaking directly to the database systems without file intermediates, and if we need to transmit program data from one place to another, it will be via cloning/replication, or a textual dump and restore in some (rare) circumstances. Make no mistake about it, the key-value and column based architecture of current nosql solutions is going to transition to graph databases in the not to distant future - the algorithms to make efficient use of graph databases aren't quite there yet but it is getting very close. The idea of a single consistent world view is going to shift to various contexts and sub-contexts where consistency need not hold throughout the hierarchy (exactly in the manner of forks and branches). We will share data by establishing contextual nesting and hierarchies of information primacy. Files are an artifact of early computing architecture, and holding on to them beyond their useful lifetime will only anchor us.
xer0x 14y ago
I'm really impressed with LightTable, and I was hoping for a more insightful critique of the project. The integrated prototyping playground within the app is an excellent idea. Yes, LightTable is borrowing many ideas from WorryDream.com and that is one of the reasons it is so promising. Anyway, seeing so many people missing the point of this project finally pushed me into sponsoring it on KickStarter.
loup-vaillant 14y ago
> I am assuming java here, so i will refer to classes instead of functions for my examples. This particular difference makes this part of the comparison meaningless. Functions and classes don't operate at the same level of granularity. Thinking classes vs thinking functions can produce very very different code, especially if your classes are assignment happy, and your functions avoid side effects. Plus, you wouldn't search the same way. In a class setting, one would search for data to process, while in a function setting, one would seek to process data.
politician 14y ago
There are many many comments from people who watch the Light Table video, which is clearly written in a Lisp, and come away thinking that it'll work for their Javas, Pythons, or C#s. Yet, it is not at all clear to me that Light Table is an appropriate IDE for languages that are not functional and are not homoiconic. I don't think it is entirely Chris's responsibility for dispelling Java developers of this crazy notion that Light Table is for them, and it might hurt the fundraising effort; but would you really want to be funded by people who have no real grasp of what you're building?
catshirt 14y ago
herein someone who doesn't program functional or dynamic languages concludes light table is contrived or impossible because Eclipse already does the job for them. likewise, criticizing the long term potential for a project like this because it had tabs in the concept video is silly.
overshard 14y ago
I'm not sure why so many people are up-voting this. It isn't constructive or useful. It seems to be a guy who has a vested interest in Eclipse and Java trying to downplay a possible future competitor to a framework and environment he is comfortable with...

193 points by pdeva1 14y ago

I agree with most of the points - documentation is well covered by IDE's, yep, I guess (don't use IDE's myself) ... finding functions is also pretty solved (personally I just use grep). But I disagree with the part about small functions and the example being contrived because real world functions aren't small and you can't just get your output directly like that. First of all, functions should be small. Anything you can unit test, you can put in this sort of instant feedback. It's basically just a unit test! Input goes in, output comes out. Without side-effects or other horrors. Okay, so not all functions make sense to be unit tested. Sometimes you need an integration test and the function can't have direct output like that ... you have integration tests don't you? Why not just evolve the "Instant feedback" feature to being your set of tests? I honestly don't care about much else in the LightTable demo. But I love the idea of instant feedback. Especially when working with Haskell or something.

rabbidrabbit 14y ago
Instant feedback is what makes LightTable the great concept it is.
spuz 14y ago
As he says in the article, functions should be small but real world code isn't always written the way you'd want it to be. I think instant feedback would be great for understanding a piece of code that I didn't write but the chances are that if I don't understand it it is probably badly factored with large function sizes and mixed responsibilities all over the place. Ultimately there will be code for which this feature is useful and code for which it is not. I can't say I wouldn't want it to be in my IDE's bag of tools though.
- tluyben2 14y ago
  It should be annoying as possible to write/read long functions. I don't know why IDE's/editors make it so easy to write 500 line functions; it's always bad. I interview over 10 programmers/day and function size is a huge filter; you recognize crappy programmers fast that way.
feiern 14y ago
I think the author did not really get the motivation behind the LightTable concept. For those interested, it was this talk that inspired the guy(s): http://vimeo.com/36579366 http://vimeo.com/36579366 It's about the instant feedback during development as opposed to the classic change/compile/reload cycle. Especially for concepts it's important to understand the intention rather than picking on it point-by-point (which in itself, while true for the most part, seems rather pedantic to me).
- Swizec 14y ago
  Honestly, I've been aching for this to become a reality ever since I saw that talk.

camperman 14y ago

"Since I am a Java guy and the IDE concepts are defined as being language agnostic and that support for additional languages can be added later, I will compare the examples using Java code and Eclipse as the IDE." And you end up proving nothing more than Java isn't a dynamic language where everything is available to you all the time without recompiling - and therefore won't really fit into to LightTable very well. The examples in LightTable are not contrived as you call them - people using dynamic programming environments work with instant feedback like this all the time.

Uchikoma 14y ago
I'd like to learn how a dynamic language here is different from "static" language like Scala. Care to explain?
- quadhome 14y ago
  Dynamic programming environment. Not dynamic language. See: SLIME http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B_4vhsmRRI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B_4vhsmRRI
  - Uchikoma 14y ago
    Thx.

iamgopal 14y ago

I had an idea of creating IDE which frees developer from organizing files and functions etc. Every class definition and functions will be stored in CodeDB. Compiler/Interpreter talks to CodeDB to resolve. Controller seats in the middle and talking to All three, developer, CodeDB and compiler. Maybe I should create concept demo/video/image of it.

Uchikoma 14y ago
Smalltalk?
spooneybarger 14y ago
You should check out a Smalltalk environment that isn't Gnu Smalltalk or Redline Smalltalk, neither of which currently has the full Smalltalk IDE experience. "Pharo By Example" would be a good starting point. If you are interested, feel free to email me, I'm quite happy to introduce people to what a Smalltalk environment has to offer so they can take it back to their day to day and start to spread the ideas.

jsmcgd 14y ago

This critique seems to be analogous to a low level language programmer dismissing the benefits of a high level language because both are Turing complete. Yes both IDEs may be able to do similar things, but it's the immediacy with which you can do them which sets them apart. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

zerostar07 14y ago
You gave the answer yourself: if you want to make programmers more productive build a higher level language, not an IDE. IMHO IDEs are overrated. If any process can be automated, it will eventually end up in code, not in a GUI. [disclaimer: i dont use any IDE)
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  These days, the IDE is apart of the language; we will see more languages that push integration with their IDE in as much as Smalltalk did in the past. No one would think about using a language without a compiler, developers increasingly feel the same way about the IDE.
- gnaritas 14y ago
  Your critique is off the mark. IDE can do things that make no sense as a language feature but help you write code very fast. Command keys for things like show me all senders of this method, show me all references to this class, show me all implementations of this method, show me all inheritors of this method, go to the definition of this thing, show me a tree of the class hierarchy, rename this method fixing all senders, extract this code into a new method, extract these methods into a new superclass, push these methods up or down in the hierarchy. These are things IDE's can do for you to enable you to code much faster by being aware of the structure of the language rather than editing everything as streams of text. I work in sublime text 2 doing ruby code, and I miss the hell out of these Smalltalk IDE features, text editors just can't compare; they're great at slinging text, but I don't want to sling text, I want to sling around semantically relevant chunks of code in ways that don't break it automatically.

sirn 14y ago

> Even if it were somehow to ignore api calls that say, modify your filesystem, how would the IDE 'know' about that api. Will someone have to manually go through all the apis in existence and make a list of which ones to emulate and which ones to not? That doesn't seem practical. Why do Light Table need to emulate something? People have been executing code in REPL since forever, Light Table instant feedback seems like an extension to the REPL concept, with an ability to substitute all variables visually in-place. I can't see why it should be any different.

lemming 14y ago
Because when you execute code in a REPL you choose when to do so, presumably because you understand the side effects. The IDE doesn't but has to execute the code anyway to give you the feedback. This might be useful for pure functions but you'd need some kind of integrated mocking functionality for impure code.

GlennS 14y ago

I'm a bit unconvinced about the 'language agnostic' assumption. For Java, you want to get the most out of your static typing. So, you need an IDE filled with analysis tools. For dynamically typed languages, Eclipse doesn't cut it. It gets sluggish and crashes too often and that's not acceptable when your language is designed for rapid feedback. I want something that gives me feedback as if I were using Firebug, but feels like I'm typing into Notepad++, and it seems like LightTable could fill that need. My thinking is that Light Table will live or die by how responsive it feels.

twelvechairs 14y ago

Of course the original video was not perfect. It is a concept, not a fully fleshed out product. It piqued peoples interest for good reason, because of a combination of many ideas working together in a clean interface. To criticise it for details ('this takes up half the screen', 'some of these things have been done before', 'this particular feature might not work for the kinds of work I do') is to entirely miss the point of a 'concept'. It needs constructive input (eg. 'this is a good idea, but would work better if done like that'). The kind of criticism provided here doesn't help anyone much at all.

web_chops 14y ago
I wonder if this is one of the reasons we are stuck with crappy development tools in era of slick iPads. Not only do we balk at the amount being raised (also happened with ruby.app), we also tend to criticize any thing that looks new and trying to change status quo. At the worst this will be a half baked IDE while still offering some creative features paving way for (hopefully) better future IDEs. You don't see many people haring off to criticize other creative projects the same way outside programming world.
Someone 14y ago
Yes, but most, if not all, of the concept has been done before. Given that, I think the question why things would work better this time is one that the backers of this project should think about before starting development. My input would be that I think the cute displays in the video will not work on real-scale projects. One reason is that I do not see how the most interesting part, the live display of a call graph, will work as nicely as displayed in the video with: - functions that manipulate disk or network state - large functions - deeply nested functions, in particular recursive ones I can envision each of them, but all in a somewhat ugly way. The first would require programmers to write set-up and tear-down code; the second and third would eat screen real estate and/or would involve scrolling and/or collapsing. If you have to write that setup and teardown code, I do not see how this interactive way of testing code is that much better than writing unit tests. Translating that into constructive feedback: I would aim for building a good tool for education first; then, work on the scaling problem. But, be prepared: you should be happy if you get the education part only; you may not find a way to scale this up to real-world projects. And you should also realize beforehand that, if this does not scale, the educational program may be seen as a toy, only useful in the first half-year or so, only because 'real programmers' do not use it. It may take time to overcome that, just like it took (or even: is taking) time to overcome the notion that real programmers do not use IDEs. [Going on a tangent: I would love to have a system that allowed me to split unit tests into API examples and all the other tests (timing tests, integration tests specific to certain bugs, etc.) That way, the documentation system could grab the first kind of tests and show them in the documentation. I also would like to see a system that forbid me to write code that is not covered by a unit test yet. For example, in C, it would force programmers to write the header file first, the unit tests exercising part of the code second, and the actual code last. It should allow me to write the whole header file, then implement and test that header in parts, though. I also might hate it the moment I see it, but I need to see it to discover that.]

kenneth 14y ago

You're comparing Java to Clojure. Conceptually, they're insanely different--Apple and Oranges, really. Clojure, Lisp, and similar languages are homoiconic. That means they're beautifully suited to an interactive environment such as that provided by LightTable. Conceptually, unlike typical IDEs, LightTable is not a series of scripts that will attempt to help you deal with common development tasks such as looking up documentation and refactoring. Instead, you're interacting directly with the language. I think it's quite telling that in Java, documentation is done through Javadoc comments, which are ignored by the compiler and sought out by a completely separate tool in order to build docs. In Clojure, documentation is part of the homoiconic code itself: (defn my-fn "This is the documentation, can be inspected on the fly" [] …) Instead of being a series of very reliable hacks on top of a language that doesn't support docs, docs are part of the environment. Additionally, when programming in Clojure, you can do it interactively by modifying the environment on the fly. This was popularized by smalltalk, and is an extremely gratifying way to program: you can inspect and edit your program code while it's running, and have a fully-featured REPL into your program. This way of doing things blows GDB completely out of the water. Note also that when coding functionally, files are often made up of many small single-purpose functions, which is actually much more maintainable than the example "real-world use case" function you provided. Essentially, your entire argument is based around the assumption that Java is the right set of design patterns. I would argue that the Java language is deeply flawed, and leads to a 30:1 ratio of boilerplate code, markup, and structure to useful code. It's what makes Javadoc and IDE refactoring tools possible, but it's also what makes Java a nightmare to maintain and (for me) an extremely unpleasant language to work in. I have never used LightTable, but for me, what it represents is a different way of thinking about programming. It's about interacting with your code directly and interactively. And actually, when writing Clojure, I often program in quite a similar fashion with existing tools (VimClojure / Clojure.tmbundle / Cake).

dibbeke 14y ago
Java's annotations could be seen as 'part of the environment' (whatever that may mean). I often use annotations which indicate how a method should be used, and those annotations are used by static analysis to validate correctness. When using Java, I often change my program while it is running. recompiling classes on the fly. It works in most cases, and when it doesn't work, I believe other languages would fail as well. You say Java is deeply flawed. I argue that Java is one of the most successful languages around nowadays. It does what it is designed to do: be relatively easy to learn, a natural successor to C++ with a wide range of libraries. Yes, Java code can often be verbose, but this depends greatly on the kind of paradigms used. I can write verbose and ugly code in Clojure and write relatively concise and elegant code in Java. It depends on architecture, a good understanding of OOP (and its limitations), composition over inheritance. The problem with Java is the sheer amount of 'bad' code written in it (because of all the leagues of beginner programmers), giving it a bad name. Have you seen Clojure code of a large product (equivalent to around 1M code lines of Java), produced by a team of diverse programmers and maintained by another team during a 10 year lifespan? You would cringe just as hard. Finally, lighttable is a proof-of-concept... It's not there yet; there are no reviews; leagues of smart engineers have tried to reproduce something similar and could not escape the POC phase at all.

Rage 14y ago

Eclipse as a good ide ? mpprfrffrt

andos 14y ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." That's the blog of a company that makes a tool that integrates with Eclipse.
- dibbeke 14y ago
  Ah, another ad hominem! Let me reply with an ad hominem: Would you translate your statement into: "It is difficult to get Prashant Deva to understand something, when the salary of Prashant Deva depends upon his not understanding it"? No? Then don't make your senseless statement. Please argue his statement instead. Or, maybe you're not a computer scientist, because you're not able to comprehend and participate in a normal discussion?
  - Rage 14y ago
    Well, Eclipse is slow, crashes, has a lot of features but doesn't really do anything nicely (javadoc integration is damn awful tu use). More features doesn't mean better. What i like about LighTables is that it seems to have few features, but do them well. It has a nice clean UI (even if it's just mockup, i don't think it needs anything else) and the UX seems nice too from what i understood. Maybe what you didn't understood is that it's NOT an IDE for computer scientists : it's more aimed to visual programmer, webdev, or gamedev, creativecoders. People that want to do both design and coding. BTW : i just trashed Eclipse, not anyone. I still use it because it's still the best ide for javacoding (even if i haven't done any in a while), which, to me, isn't really flattering for the state of coding IDEs.
    - dibbeke 14y ago
      Eclipse needs a good amount of memory and recently, unfortunately, has a tendency to crash. Most of the features can be disabled; the UI can be reconfigured to your liking. Btw, I generally disable the javadoc view and just F3 to the location to see the code and docs together (docs are often wrong anyways). The problem with mockups is that they haven't touched reality yet: there is always so much detail you don't see at the start.

blahbap 14y ago

There is definetely room for an IDE that is more intuitive and slick than Eclipse - I find Eclipse's many views and modes distracting. Perhaps Light Table is not a revolution of IDEs, but it is certainly a welcome leap in the evolution.

ABS 14y ago

classic example of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Many of the other comments explain why.

zacharyvoase 14y ago

I find this 'critique' (it's not a critique, it's a takedown) to run against the spirit of Hacker News. Someone built a concept showing how the experience of writing code, for their corner of the software ecosystem, could be improved. They found popular support, and they're now setting about to make that concept happen. Congratulations; this is what Hacker News is supposed to be all about. And here's someone summarily piecing apart and nitpicking on that concept (and the details of the demo video) for no apparent reason—there's no feedback or suggestions for improvement, it's just saying "well Eclipse does this and this and this already". I'm not impressed.

shadowmint 14y ago
yes! So this. I agree; Let's see some constructive criticism and ideas for how to improve the LightTable idea, instead of just trying to shoot it down as 'not novel'.
- rweba 14y ago
  Parenthetically, I get rather irritated with people who like to criticize everything as "not novel." Depending on how you look at it almost nothing is completely "novel" ("nothing new under the sun" and all that). What is important is the execution and new wrinkles in the CURRENT iteration - NOT whether something vaguely or even pretty similar was attempted or proposed at some point in the past.
- prospero 14y ago
  There is a valid point lurking in there. The instant evaluation model doesn't play nicely with side-effects. Exactly where side-effects occur can be difficult to determine, there's no simple way to work around this. This is less of a problem in Clojure, thanks to its immutable data structures, but they're not a panacea. I'm also not sure how well this would work in JS and Python, the other languages that Light Table intends to initially target. One possible solution is to have hooks into side-effects: you could display console output or logging alongside the instant evaluation. The real difficulty is network communication: even if you're okay with actually sending requests over the wire, there's an awkward balance between visibility and generality. Something like libpcap [1] is very general, but gives minimal insight into the content. Hooking into a particular HTTP client library gives you a lot more visibility into what's going on, but you'll need to do this every time you want to use a new library. [1] http://www.tcpdump.org/ http://www.tcpdump.org/

shadowmint 14y ago

Don't agree with everything the author has to say (particularly functions) but I think it's fair criticism. LightTable isn't going to be a great fit for some languages, specifically c, c#, java and c++ style languages; I'm extremely dubious you'll be able to get the sort 'instant feedback' shown in the demo for that sort of compiled complex language with cyclic dependencies (A imports B imports C, imports A. Yay, java... :P). ...but really, that's not what it's targeting. So, fair criticism to the author I feel: don't complain you won't be able to use a hammer to cut down a tree.

daniel_solano 14y ago

Is the demo a bit contrived? Sure, but it's an inspired vision that was whipped up inside of a week. I don't think the creator has any illusions that making the vision a reality will be easy. However, it is clear that this vision is inspiring to a lot of developers and has some traction.

richardk 14y ago

Also even if the code were indeed based on just basic numerical or string primitives, how would the 'instant feedback' work if the code were in a long, tight loop or did heavy cpu intensive stuff? I think this is a critical point, has the author of LightTable considered what would happen with instant feedback for less trivial pieces of code? Besides that, I think this critique is fair, because honestly when I saw LightTable, it seemed like smoke and mirrors. I have a friend quietly writing an innovative new text editor, I expect it will be more 'ground-breaking' than LightTable, but I don't see him trying to take everybody's money.

Zak 14y ago
I think this is a critical point, has the author of LightTable considered what would happen with instant feedback for less trivial pieces of code? Some of the code in his demo talked to the web framework he wrote (that I use in production code) and IIRC to the SQL abstraction layer he wrote (that I also use in production code). Something makes me think that he has given some thought to how these things might interact with the real world. I think it's fair to ask for money. Chris Granger has a track record of building useful, production-worthy libraries and tools both professionally and as a hobby. If he's going to not work for a while, possibly hire other people and build an open source IDE, it's reasonable to ask for outside funding.
- richardk 14y ago
  I'm not sure about others, but I wouldn't give my money to any software project that didn't describe in detail how it might overcome such glaring design challenges.
  - Zak 14y ago
    You seem to be focused on the instant feedback and stack display issues. Instant feedback is not meaningfully different from a REPL in this respect. It is unlikely you would type imperative things like "delete this directory" in to a source file. You might define a cleanup function that deletes files, but it would be pretty unusual to call it at the toplevel unless you were intentionally using the code buffer as a REPL. I'll grant that immediate evaluation of such things might be a little dangerous, but Clojure, though the JVM does have mechanisms to dangerous things like file IO. Stack display seems like an easier problem to solve: only display a certain depth, or just put a scroll bar on it. It doesn't matter how much stuff there is as long as you're looking at the part you're likely to want by default. I think the one downfall of this project as currently envisioned might be that this is a great concept for Clojure and perhaps some other functional languages. It could be good for JS if written in a mostly functional style. Python is a little less functional and is commonly used for scripts, which wouldn't play as nicely with instant feedback. Scripts are distinct from applications or daemons in that they normally contain a sequence of imperative actions that they evaluate and then quit. They might not define any functions at all. Applications and daemons typically run code from an entry point like a main() function. LightTable seems to be designed with Clojure in mind, and Clojure was not designed with scripts in mind.

edanm 14y ago

Everyone is jumping in to disagree with the OP. I have to be honest: I thought the OP's points were very well made, and as much as I loved the LightTable demo, I think I immediately dismissed it, in my mind, as "looks cool, but can't be made". I think there is a big disconnect between this author, a "working programmer" who actually writes code, and at least some of the commenters in this thread. Let me give my take on a few of the differences: For one thing, the op mentioned that, while functions should be small, they usually aren't. And while functions, ideally, should be self-contained, most of the code people write is a mixture of calls to external sources, libraries, etc. I.e., things that can't be seen ahead of time. In practice, the OP is 100% correct. Most of the code I see, ends up being exactly this kind of code. I question whether anyone who claims otherwise has any experience with real systems. I just can't imagine anyone disagreeing that most code looks like this in the real world. Another point of disconnect is the "I don't use an IDE" theme that's common here. I think you'll find that HNers, as a whole, are a lot more prone to be anti-IDE. Much of the "real world" programmers would be shocked that so many HNers give up the comfort of all that the IDE provides. And, at least to my mind, there is an attitude here that using an IDE makes you a worse programmer. The truth is, the author is correct to point out that a lot of the cool stuff in the demo already exists. If for no other reason than to point out that, if you think a lot of the cool stuff shown in the demo is worth looking into, you might want to check out Eclipse or other IDEs. Finally, let me make one final point, specifically to zacharyvoase and the others who think this post is "against the spirit of Hacker News", etc. I totally understand you, and I agree, the LightTable creator deserves a lot of credit for what he's trying to do, whether successful or not. But I think that a critique of the project, especially showing which parts of it have already been created, is amazingly beneficial. No, the OP did not offer many suggestions. But I imagine that, if the LightTable group did not know about some of the things that Eclipse does already, this post will help them out. And this post will certainly get them thinking about whether some of what they demoed is possible. In fact, if it were me running the LightTable project, I might decide to start with an MVP of building LightTable as an Eclipse plugin, to check out some of their concepts. Edit: P.S. I shouldn't have to give "credentials" for expressing a view on HN, but I will anyway. I've been programming professionally for 8 years, and I now run a freelance/consulting software company so have seen many codebases. More importantly, I'm an IDE and editor nut. Most of the start of my career was on Visual Studio, then SlickEdit, and since then I've tried out many IDEs and editors. I now mostly use Vim, while sometimes dropping into SublimeText. I think Eclipse is an amazing tool, and couldn't imagine programming Java without it. I think most people here would be absolutely amazed at the help Eclipse gives in writing Java code, which I'm sure gives many programmers a huge boost in their time to code.

rjurney 14y ago

Java is an Integrated Develompment Environment scripting language that is incompatible with Light Table.

6ren 14y ago

Apart from a sparser screen, the heart is "instant feedback". There are challenges in scaling this up from the demo, but I want to see what can be done - it's Research and Development, not simple implementation. Chris Granger has a solid background for this (on the Visual Studio team). And working code. :-) IMHO there are obviously solutions to these problems, but I'm not sure how graceful/usable they'll be. Maybe great; maybe just a significant improvement; maybe just good for some niche cases - we'll see! Firstly, we can sandbox - including the file-system; even make a copy, so it runs without "really" changing anything (in the limit, there's virtualization). Second, some of these problems are common to testing, where mocking is a standard solution to the same problem of wanting to run just some code. [Perhaps a significant result will be a way of auto-mocking?] And even if you don't Test, you still run code to see if it's working - this is the same; just faster. How do you control what code you run? Light Table can incorporate the same techniques. OTOH, I run code with ctrl-tab, up-arrow + return. It's pretty fast. Easing the setup of that would be good though. The full version is not going be as magical as the demo; but it seems unlikely that current IDE tech has reached perfection, and cannot be improved upon...

jroseattle 14y ago

I find the OP to be off-base in critique of the LightTable concept. To be sure, the concept has some likely drawbacks and would need real-world application to gauge viability, but I thought the critique by comparison to Eclipse missed the point. If there is anything that good design has taught us, it's that doing things better has significantly greater value than simply doing more things. For example, the first comparative in this critique is the "docs everywhere" feature. The OP shows that the LightTable concept "eats up half the screen", "can't resize", etc. while showing that Eclipse has the same feature (with the javadoc tab at the bottom of the screen.) The OP sees documentation show up in both places, so it's called a wash/irrelevant. When I view those same two screenshots, I see a significant difference. In Eclipse, I see yet another tab/doc/thingy with information crammed in it; in LightTable, I see information displayed in parallel with the code, not having to compete for screen space. The OP's comment about documentation "eating up half the screen size" implies that more information on the screen is better than less information. I find the LightTable design in this scenario as saying some information is more important than others. It's mostly just aesthetics, but aesthetics is kind of the point behind LightTable.

gfodor 14y ago

Nobody said it was going to be easy. Where's the author's imagination? My guess is it was slowly killed by working inside of Java for many years.

pbreit 14y ago

The OP comes off as a jerk, mistakenly claiming that Light Table was presented as "game-changing" or "revolutionary, outright dismissive of things that "were done 10 years ago" and, worst of all, critiquing in detail something that doesn't even exist.

NathanRice 14y ago

I don't much care for trendiness or bandwagon hopping, but there are a few things about lighttable clearly hit on the future of computing (though quite by accident, I imagine). First, programs and databases will grow together continuously. The missing piece of the puzzle here is that currently most people view databases as a single correct representation of the world, and assume that whether you have an acid database or a nosql solution, all transactions must eventually be reconciled, and a single truth must emerge. This is patently false. In actuality, database systems will begin to resemble distributed version control systems very closely over the next five to eight years, until they are almost indistinguishable. The two will meet in the middle as all distributed revision control systems end up using off the shelf graph database systems, and these graph database systems incorporate additional functionality to support one them. At some point most editors will be capable of speaking directly to the database systems without file intermediates, and if we need to transmit program data from one place to another, it will be via cloning/replication, or a textual dump and restore in some (rare) circumstances. Make no mistake about it, the key-value and column based architecture of current nosql solutions is going to transition to graph databases in the not to distant future - the algorithms to make efficient use of graph databases aren't quite there yet but it is getting very close. The idea of a single consistent world view is going to shift to various contexts and sub-contexts where consistency need not hold throughout the hierarchy (exactly in the manner of forks and branches). We will share data by establishing contextual nesting and hierarchies of information primacy. Files are an artifact of early computing architecture, and holding on to them beyond their useful lifetime will only anchor us.

xer0x 14y ago

I'm really impressed with LightTable, and I was hoping for a more insightful critique of the project. The integrated prototyping playground within the app is an excellent idea. Yes, LightTable is borrowing many ideas from WorryDream.com and that is one of the reasons it is so promising. Anyway, seeing so many people missing the point of this project finally pushed me into sponsoring it on KickStarter.

loup-vaillant 14y ago

> I am assuming java here, so i will refer to classes instead of functions for my examples. This particular difference makes this part of the comparison meaningless. Functions and classes don't operate at the same level of granularity. Thinking classes vs thinking functions can produce very very different code, especially if your classes are assignment happy, and your functions avoid side effects. Plus, you wouldn't search the same way. In a class setting, one would search for data to process, while in a function setting, one would seek to process data.

politician 14y ago

There are many many comments from people who watch the Light Table video, which is clearly written in a Lisp, and come away thinking that it'll work for their Javas, Pythons, or C#s. Yet, it is not at all clear to me that Light Table is an appropriate IDE for languages that are not functional and are not homoiconic. I don't think it is entirely Chris's responsibility for dispelling Java developers of this crazy notion that Light Table is for them, and it might hurt the fundraising effort; but would you really want to be funded by people who have no real grasp of what you're building?

catshirt 14y ago

herein someone who doesn't program functional or dynamic languages concludes light table is contrived or impossible because Eclipse already does the job for them. likewise, criticizing the long term potential for a project like this because it had tabs in the concept video is silly.

overshard 14y ago

I'm not sure why so many people are up-voting this. It isn't constructive or useful. It seems to be a guy who has a vested interest in Eclipse and Java trying to downplay a possible future competitor to a framework and environment he is comfortable with...