19 ms·

The future is specific

346 points by olauzon 14y ago

ibdknox 14y ago
As promised, this is the second demo complete with python! For those who can't use vimeo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osLReQSB9F0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osLReQSB9F0
- SudarshanP 14y ago
  It is so sad that Vimeo is blocked by many Indian ISPs for silly reasons. The whole Internet feels crippled. There must have been at least a dozen videos I wanted to watch today that were recklessly censored. Thanks for the youtube link. I think we need a Redundant Array of Cloud Videos.
  - djKianoosh 14y ago
    off topic, but dont feel bad, vimeo and youtube are both blocked at DHS.
    - peterhajas 14y ago
      Do you mean the Department of Homeland Security?
      - djKianoosh 14y ago
        Yes. HQ specifically.
- abhaga 14y ago
  Thank you for taking time to put it on Youtube also! I really liked the website example. Reaching to the right code in the right file gets cumbersome pretty quickly in a project of even medium size!
- Estragon 14y ago
  It would be great to see the code used to make these modes.
nebiros 14y ago
RUUUUUUBBBBYYYYY SUUUUPPPOOOORRRTTTTT!
- randall 14y ago
  Hopefully with the speed he added Python, ruby / rails support is only weeks away too. :)
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- stayclassytally 14y ago
  I agree! this just screams Ruby/Rails/Sinatra to me. Can't wait for it's release.
- gaius 14y ago
  Dear Rubyists/rockstar ninjas/brogrammers/whatever you're calling yourselves this week: please stay well away from whatever community develops around Light Table.
gumuz 14y ago
I love it, especially the grouping of files: route + models + templates, in 1 view is something I see a use for. Does anyone know of an editor which can do something similar?
- viscanti 14y ago
  Plenty of editors offer split view editing. You'll need to actually open the route, model and template files, but it's easy enough to have them all open at the same time. The real challenge here is how they'll handle larger files (real-world production code rarely is that small and clean, you almost always have complex logic and a number of database calls).
  - gumuz 14y ago
    isn't it the idea to forget about files, so I can see the models & and views I'm interested in in for a particular workflow. Regardles of where & which file they're located in?
lubutu 14y ago
I don't quite understand what the difference is between Light Table's modes and IDEs' plugins. Domain-specific components are exactly what make IDEs 'integrated'; without them they are generalised editors. But there is absolutely no difference, as far as I can tell, between Light Table's new SQL mode and an SQL IDE plugin. I'm personally much more fond of the Unix 'tool approach', in which there are no task-specific modes or plugins, but tools can still be composed ad hoc, as in Plan 9's Acme.
- ibdknox 14y ago
  Sure, anything can be built given enough time :) The difference is that those modes can be built in a couple of hours with arbitrary UI and virtually any interactions you can think of. It's hard for me to imagine being able to build any of the things I showed in say Eclipse in any reasonable amount of time. The idea is that Light Table will be built from the ground up to support very dynamic environmental contexts in which you can place anything.
  - ori_b 14y ago
    So, an IDE with a better plugin API?
  - artursapek 14y ago
    So Light Table is a rapid prototyping tool?
    - derefr 14y ago
      Light Table is a rapid tool prototyping platform :)
  - Arelius 14y ago
    But, instead compare that to Emacs, these are exactly the sorts of things people can and do do in emacs in reasonable amounts of time. And exactly why emacs has many great tools, from paredit-mode to SLIME. The comparison to emacs isn't meant as a slight to LightTable either, but please, let's not forgot the past when creating the future.
pwny 14y ago
Boy am I happy I pledged for Light Table. And the benchmark mode looks so freaking great. I'm getting excited just thinking about it. I don't think I'll be able to wait until the early beta. ARGHH!
mcrittenden 14y ago
With all of the demos and information posted I still have trouble visualizing this working for real-world applications. A specific example: in the Python/Flask demo, functions were added to the current view as it was called. How would this work in a more complex case with calls to many functions, each which call many more functions (and so on), each belonging to different objects, etc.? The view would quickly become a huge list of functions and code blocks, most of which you probably don't need to see at any given time, and at this point it's no more useful than plain old user-curated tabs. That's just one example. The same conceptual problems pop up for stuff like on-the-fly code execution (what if your code depends on user input or many SQL queries or files that may or may not exist at that point), benchmark mode (benchmarking a complex app is obviously a lot more complicated than just running two code blocks side by side), etc. I know this is just a demo and it's all very early in the process, and I'm not saying that this should be a solved problem yet, but I just can't picture in my head a way that this could ever be a solved problem as long as LightTable remains somewhat similar to its current state.
- option_greek 14y ago
  They could display it as a graph with function names like a call stack. Most IDEs support most of the features shown in a piecemeal fashion but Light table seem to have the features more integrated, reducing the friction between coding and testing.
- ibdknox 14y ago
  Right now it goes at most one level deep into the call tree to prevent what you're talking about. The thinking I've had so far is that you then have a few options. You could go to one of the specific functions and say I want to see everything, you could go to a specific token and bring up its definition, or you could "focus" it to switch the starting point to that function. I think any of those could work, but I haven't tested them yet :) To your second point the normal caveats of a replish environment will apply to any code execution stuff :) And the benchmarking mode was a simple example for working against functions once you already know they're the bottleneck. In a real application you probably need help getting there. I agree and I think a big part of the job ahead is to understand how we can ensure these sorts of experiences mesh and flow together when working on something larger. Fortunately, Light Table itself provides a great project to prove that on.
DasIch 14y ago
The first time I heard about Light Table I was rather critical but this begins to look like something that could really replace vim for me. This is rather surprising given my general distaste of IDEs.
- moe 14y ago
  Same here. As much as I like vim - it remains software from the stone age and it seems absurd that our main work interface (editor and shell) still consists of an emulated 1980s text-mode terminal. LightTable looks like a major step in the right direction. I think the best indicator for success will be when the vim/emacs-diehards start porting their respective shortcuts and functionality over. I could very well see this fundamental approach (modular/dynamically expanding interface) become the new paradigm for editors and (hopefully) terminals if the author manages to make the prototype versatile and hacker-friendly enough. We've really been entrapped inside ancient TTY-emulations and inadequate GUI-widget sets for way too long.
  - DanI-S 14y ago
    The thing that draws me to Vim, really, is the extensibility. There's a steep learning curve to creating a powerful Vim extension, but there are still a huge number of them. Imagine if Light Table can make editor extension something you can do per project! I probably have a unique preferred layout of Vim splits and tabs that I use for each codebase I work with. Being able to take this further, telling the editor which parts of code are significant and in which ways they go together, I'd have so much less mental overhead. I love the idea that I could navigate our current codebase by endpoint, jumping to the account management portion of our API, automatically having the relevant back-end code and unit tests on-screen, along with benchmark info and test results. Since we adhere to general conventions at least within a project, there's no reason this can't be done.
    - mattbriggs 14y ago
      vims extensibility is a commonly cited positive, but I totally do not understand it, since pretty much every editor imaginable is extensible in similar fashion, and pretty much all of the use better languages then vim. By contrast, emacs is basically an application platform that ships with an editor implementation, and eclipse is a platform for building editors. It's not that vim isn't extensible, it is, just not as much as other alternatives, and nowhere near as easily as most of its competition. IMO the real advantage of vim is that it is a highly efficient and productive tool that works great without any customization, and is available everywhere without installation. Which is pretty much the opposite of the above opinion.
kitsune_ 14y ago
This somehow reminds me of Microsoft's "strategy", or whatever you want to call it (VisualStudio LightSwitch, SharePoint Designer)?
bnegreve 14y ago
Being specific is not a feature, this is what you do when you have no other way to solve a problem. The ambitious challenge raised by Light Table was to generalize Bret Victor's ideas to general programming, if they are unable to do this, I'll stick to my IDE.
- qiemem 14y ago
  Bret Victor's ideas apply differently to different problem domains. This was very apparent from his talk. It looks like Chris is trying to build a platform that makes applying Bret's ideas very simple and natural. Also, I assume that many of these modes will be generalized and available out of the box, so all you have to do is the pick the one that best suits your needs for any given task.
- simonb 14y ago
  It generalizes them the lisp way: by building machines that build machines.
- espeed 14y ago
  In case anyone is wondering: "Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII)
  - d0mine 14y ago
    Thank you for the link. Make tools to be extensions of our bodies via immediate feedback is a useful idea (it is not the main point of talk, but it stands out to me). As a side note: It might be even be literally true for physical tools i.e., a brain can physically change to see the tool as an extension of the hand (from a study about ape, its brain, and a stick).
ulf 14y ago
Looks more promising every time! While I like the idea to not work on your stuff as files, I have a question in that regard: Do you have specific plans on how to incorporate version control when not primarily relying on files?
- ibdknox 14y ago
  It's still serializing to files - it has to, our workflows are entirely dependent on them :)
  - socksy 14y ago
    Are you developing Light Table using Light Table? If not, is that a future aim?
frou_dh 14y ago
If you come up with some new code in a "scratchpad" area and want to save it, where will it go? In a new file? Appended to the end of an existing file? Similarly, if you edit one of the "supporting" functions that appear and want to save those changes, will they be saved in-place (e.g. line 217-241) in whichever file that function is from?
islon 14y ago
This is amazing! I can't wait to use it.
kamaal 14y ago
I don't mind if the future is specific. But its really wrong to say IDE's like Eclipse don't do one specific task well. Eclipse really makes Java programming very easy. And I can tell you minus Eclipse programming in Java would be a very frustrating experience, given the verbosity, configuration mess and XML's all over the place. Eclipse these days is advanced enough to really blur the difference between and novice and a expert Java programmers. So by any measure I would say eclipse already does what light table aims to do. The only problem with eclipse is its too heavy, chews a lot of memory and becomes very heavy as things go on. What we expect from light table is really what things like Emacs and Vim already are, plus what they miss. Which is modern GUI candy, easy configuration, availability of packages, stuff like refactoring, bench marking, auto complete and Intellisense easily available out of the box. Along with evolution with modern needs and demands. So that is why what we really needed was an Emacs + all that I mentioned. I think it will be nice if at some point requirements are frozen for Light table. Because things like this really slip into Second systems effect easily. According to me Light Table must be Emacs for the Modern Generation. Anything else, and it won't be impressive. A thin editor, extensible by lisp. All lisp and other Emacs editor goodies but with all the modern demands. We already have enough of other kind of IDE's.
- ibdknox 14y ago
  These were examples of extensions to make a point and not at all what we'll be focusing on. What we're making sure of is that the platform for such things exists and enables all of the things that old UI's and such don't allow. I think the parallel to emacs is a good one and while I certainly won't say at this point that we'll be the "modern emacs", it's our hope we can come close.
  - mattbriggs 14y ago
    out of curiosity, is js going to be your "elisp"?
    - phyzome 14y ago
      Clojurescript, actually -- a Clojure dialect that compiles to JS. Well, Clojure too, on the server side of things.
haliax 14y ago
LOVE the web example! Keep up the good work!
JimmyL 14y ago
>> The future of tools isn't in a better Eclipse or Visual Studio, it's in easily created domain specific experiences. How is that goal different from that of the Eclipse platform (http://www.eclipse.org/platform/overview.php http://www.eclipse.org/platform/overview.php) - a common base where people can develop individual add-ons to suit the domain they're working on? Eclipse platform and LT clearly have different interaction models and technologies, but from the leading quote of the article, the same goal. Writing Java in Eclipse is, as many have said, a great experience (in the continuum of Java-development experience). But you know what else is pretty good? PyDev (http://pydev.org/ http://pydev.org/) - a Python IDE that's written on the Eclipse platform. It uses the same interaction models and designs as Eclipse for Java, but it's also got a whole bunch of bits that are just targeted at Python development. There's also a tool (the name of which I don't recall) that our DBA uses for all his database management that's written on the Eclipse platform. I'm all for specific - I use PyCharm every day, which does one thing (Python development) really well. But I think calling out Eclipse like the parent article does is wrong. It too can be a platform for "easily created domain specific experiences"; it's just a different one with a different paradigm.
- spiffworks 14y ago
  > But you know what else is pretty good? PyDev It's not. It's really not. I've heard good things about PyCharm, but the best environment for Python that I have seen so far is Emacs. And Light Table definitely looks like an improvement on that. My only concern with this is the speed. I want this to have the same response time as Emacs or Vim. Then there would be no reason not to use it.
  - JimmyL 14y ago
    I specifically chose the description "pretty good" (as opposed to "great" or something more flowery) for PyDev, because I think that best summarizes it. It's got a number of issues with it (and it's sometimes as slow as a dog), but for the hobby developer it's more than enough. Once I started working in Python and spending 30-something hours/week in the environment, its flaws started to overcome its benefits (namely: it was free, and I knew how to use it), and it was time to move to PyCharm...which is also slow, unless you throw a few gigs of RAM at it and at which point it becomes amazing.
gosub 14y ago
So the future is the Unix philosophy.
eragnew 14y ago
Light Table looks amazing. Simply amazing.
GlennS 14y ago
It's a pretty impressive demo. It looks like it could be the mother of all scratchpads. It looks like it might have a bit of a scary learning curve though. I can certainly think of a lot of ideas of what I might try to implement with such an approach. Really any existing code inspection/analysis approach. I'm thinking some sort of view onto Powershell providers could be interesting. Maybe exception lookups in the code as your browse through an error log. Definitely a regex tester utility: does your string match the regex? Do parts of it match part of the regex? What's an example string that would match? Can we display all of this dynamically in real time?
ashliana 14y ago
More of a meta comment on the future being specific and how it is all about creating more domain-specific tools vs generalized tools... I think that's really a common property in any complex, highly powerful system. Think about the brain, the economy, DNA, a corporation even... etc. Domain specificity is the past and the present, too!
spiffworks 14y ago
As an Indian who cannot access Vimeo, this is what I see. http://i.imgur.com/ojTVQ.png http://i.imgur.com/ojTVQ.png May I ask for a link to the video on another service?
- ibdknox 14y ago
  look at my comment below.
  - spiffworks 14y ago
    Thank you!
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  Aw, that is a very boring "access denied" message.
krupan 14y ago
The flask example is the really pertinent one to me. Those were all the views that you need when working on a web app and it would be awesome to have them all come up automatically like that. It's possible to make emacs show you all those views by manually opening up frames and finding the right code, and emacs can even render html (but really, use your browser of choice for that). I'm sure it would be possible to write the elisp to have it do it all almost as automagically and smoothly as light-table (but not with rounded corners). The problem is, if I'm a python expert writing python web-apps, breaking out elisp to script up an environment like this is just too daunting. Instead I usually just keep checking back at the emacs wiki to see if anyone else has done it for me... (should I admit that?) Is Light Table going to solve that problem? Unfortunately this blog post and the videos don't demonstrate how you create these modes. Do you have to become a clojure, clojurescript, html5, css expert?
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  I spent this morning fiddling with elisp to get emacs to do something I wanted. On the one hand, it's incredibly annoying, considering that I don't know anything about elisp. On the other hand, I figured out what I needed, and now it's a little easier. On the gripping hand, there's zero chance that I'll be trying to replicate that functionality in emacs. Even with the wiki, and it's random ~/Desktop/elisp_notes.ver2.txt feel, isn't that helpful.
- nickik 14y ago
  Im guessing but you should be able to use any JVM language on the server and any language that compiles to JS on the client. If you want to do more visual stuff then the framework allready does you problebly want get around html and css. With some work it would probebly be possible to make the Server IPA more general.
cwilson 14y ago
I'm specifically excited about Light Table (and the second half of this video where he dives into Python/Flask), because as a front-end guy, I generally spend most of my time in views/templates. I occasionally have to dive into models however, and it seems to me Light Table would help me navigate something I consider a bit of a wild west much more efficiently, resulting in learning much faster. Basically, I'm excited about Light Table because I think it will help me become a better programmer.
its_so_on 14y ago
March of the specific. Google didn't win by being the best general-purpose search, where people go to look for anything on the Internet. It won by being the best for searching only um, okay not the best example. Facebook didn't just raise 14billion at a valuation of 100billion by being the best general-purpose social network, where just anyone would have a profile. It won by being the best network for, uh.. Okay, not the best example. Well, take a revolutionary new product like the iPad. It doesn't have hundreds or thousands of apps to do uh, hold on. I'm sure that somewhere there's the ONE thing that it does. Uh, it's a screen? Look, step back. There's only one thing you can do in Photoshop. I mean there's just one thing to use Ubuntu for. Sorry, I meant that when you say the word 'Harvard' everyone knows what the ONE thing that they teach is! Okay, look, these might not be the BEST examples in the world. Take a pair of jeans. There is ONE time and ONE place to, uh. Fuck. I'm done. If the future is anything like the present, nobody even knows what the fuck business Amazon is in anymore. http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AMZN+Interactive#symbol=amzn;range=5y;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AMZN+Interactive#symbol=a...; The future is the very opposite of the word "specific".
- prospero 14y ago
  All of your examples are gestalts. They're not single seamless abstractions, they're patchworks that are more than the sum of their parts. That's precisely what is being proposed here: a platform for creating a development environment that is more than the sum of its parts. Something that gives you composable pieces that can be fit together into something that maps directly onto your problem space. Is this really so unclear? I can't picture the hypothetical product that you're arguing against.
  - its_so_on 14y ago
    Well, I looked at the "gestalt" Wikipedia article. As near as I can make out, you're saying that Google in fact highly tailors its search-for-geneticists, which has nothing to do with its search-for-bakers: it seems like a single whole, but isn't. But that patently isn't so. Patently, every niche runs off the same algorithms. Equally, bankers' circle of friends use the same facebook that teenagers' circle of friends use: it isn't multitudinous facebooks that seem to be one but are really quite different. Likewise jeans in jeans-and-a-blazer are obviously the same jeans as jeans in jeans-and-a-tshirt. iPad apps are built with the very same SDK and frequently have very similar UI/UX. There is literally nothing domain-specific about objective c. I will grant you that Amazon's cloud stuff is very different from its merchandizing operations, but beyond that I don't see where the big difference between shipping books and shipping dry cereal is, which is two businesses that Amazon is now in. In fact, if anything, Amazon's cloud services are the OPPOSITE of domain-specific: Reddit, which includes ZERO filesharing, is on it, and so is Dropbox, which is basically ONLY filesharing. If you look at what Amazon is actually exposing with AWS, you will see it is as generic and non-domain-specific as theoretically possible. Heck, they've even abstracted away the individual server! (So the last bastion of something that might separate a database-heavy user site from a disk-heavy backup site disappears). I would say that their whole movement is towards being non-specific. You probably understand what you're saying better than I do, so please do explain. Because from where I'm standing, it seems the whole march of the Internet is in busting domain-specific-languages and approaches. Every time a cute hack with CSS hits the front page, it's proof that CSS derives its power precisely from not being a domain specific language. Off-hand, can you name a single domain-specific language or approach that has really 'won'? You may know more about this than I do, so it is certainly a genuine question.
frendiversity 14y ago
I'd rather see Light Table features integrated into Eclipse, as creating something as fully featured as Eclipse is... ...going to end up being Eclipse. So either a massive wheel is being reinvented, or Light Table will be absent of all standard IDE features and consist of the flashy neato Code Bubbles stuff and not much more. That said, I say develop the hell out of the Light Table concept for all the "new age" (circa 196X) dynamic coder people since their IDEs tend to suck, and let's hope it becomes a standard and we can implement it all in everything else. :)
philip1209 14y ago
I was just on Subtle Patterns this morning, and I now recognize where Chris grabbed the two background aluminum images!
anoplus 14y ago
Recently I was thinking maybe software industry is too much obsessive about tool making. I wouldn't mind spending much more time and effort using a bad IDE re-factoring bad code that works good and cures cancer. I don't really care how awesome the static analysis tool I am using, or how awesome the meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta programming language I am using if I work on pointless product. Maybe I am wrong and those tools are the only way for real breakthroughs in bioinformatics. what do you think?
- nickik 14y ago
  This 'problem' is old. Even the Hackers in the 60s didn't often do anything 'real'. The made tools to make it easier to make other tools, and so on. The think is that WHEN you want to develop something real you want to have these tools ready to go. With your aditued there will not be that much progress, since everybody would have just said 'mmhh lets not develop a good compiler for C lets write assembler'. In my opinion as long as people develop better tools (languages, IDEs, compilers, debuggers) there is need for them. If one guy spends a couple of month on a Tool, how long will it take until the time saved is 'recoverd' by the users of that tool? Making tools yileds economic benefit, just like in the real word a maschine that does something better or faster will result in economic benefit. That is not do say there is never mal-investment. Somebody might spend a long time developing something and nobody will use it, programming related or not. This however is not an argument for no innovation.
negrolious 14y ago
Eclipse with http://xtext.org http://xtext.org is an outstanding platform for domain-specific languages and domain-specific tools. I don't know any tool which comes even close.
skrebbel 14y ago
A 'macro system for tools'. Isn't this what the academic bozos call Language Workbenches? Extensible tool-building platforms for DSLs are hardly anything new. Reading things like this, i sometimes worry that the HN-circling web crowd is reinventing things that others invented just a few years ago. Like some sort of collective not-invented-here syndrome. E.g. Check out MetaEdit+ - their website isn't Silicon Valley Sexy, but the tool is amazing. And has been, for the past 10+ years. http://www.metacase.com/mep/ http://www.metacase.com/mep/ Now, there's plenty new and well-rehashed ideas in Light Table. I'll be buying a license, probably. But the insight in this article isn't very new at all.
- radicalbyte 14y ago
  > Reading things like this, i sometimes worry that > the HN-circling web crowd is reinventing things > that others invented just a few years ago. The difference in this case is that the HN web crowd are targeting their fellow programmers, and not the "Enterprise" crowd. I've been following the DSL tooling scene, and it's horrible. Think closed source, expensive and targeted at the Enterprise (or specific engineering disciplines). The community is full of MDA (model-driven-architecture) types: too often is the focus on increasing complexity (for ego boosting / job security) instead of simplicity and accessibility. The HN crowd are pretty much the polar opposite: the focus is on simplicity and scale. Sharing knowledge, instead of locking it up for fun and "profit". That's why I like it here :)
  - vinodkd 14y ago
    > The community is full of MDA (model-driven-architecture) types: too often is the focus on increasing complexity (for ego boosting / job security) instead of simplicity and accessibility. > .. instead of locking it up for fun and "profit". still, if you ignore the MDA and executable uml silliness, there's quite a few ideas that can be picked from that closed space, imo.
    - nickik 14y ago
      > still, if you ignore the MDA and executable uml silliness, there's quite a few ideas that can be picked from that closed space, imo. Thats what Light Table does, isn't it? If not it will at least allow you to implement these ideas in a simple way.
ckluis 14y ago
As a non-developer. I would love this for php & wordpress. Here me out: the people who aren't in IDE's all day could benefit the most from this. They don't know where the functions are or even how to find them sometimes. I resort to google 9/10 when looking for how some functions. This has huge applications for helping non-programmers become programmers.
anigbrowl 14y ago
What I would like is a way to do more graphical programming, like this: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=reaktor&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1280&bih=909&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=djS8T6e3HYfZiQKF0cTqDQ https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=reaktor&ion=1&... or this: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=reaktor&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1280&bih=909&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=djS8T6e3HYfZiQKF0cTqDQ#um=1&hl=en&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=synthmaker&oq=synthmaker&aq=f&aqi=g1g-S9&aql=&gs_l=img.3..0j0i24l9.110954.112114.0.112243.10.8.0.2.2.0.104.671.7j1.8.0...0.0.xXcDTgxvp38&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=a40ca22810824758&biw=1280&bih=909 https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=reaktor&ion=1&... (which latter includes both C-like and assembly code modules, as well as extensive GUI manipulation capabilities). When I was learning to code, and still sometimes, what annoys me about typing is that I don't know what I don't know. With graphical programming, having predefined modules with discoverable inputs and outputs encourages me to try connecting things together on a what-if basis to a much greater degree than a textual environment. This is what I find very attractive about the way Light Table is going; a lot of the time I want to build things but not necessarily to write code.
twelvechairs 14y ago
The key line for me here is that the future is in 'easily created domain specific experiences'. I think this is very eloquently stated and can't agree more. I like what Light table is trying to do, hoewver it is still working in pretty much the same 'domain' space as existing IDE's ('code'), and trying to improve on the 'easily created... experiences' part. As the post is waxing lyrical, my piece to add to the broad-concept discussion is that I'd really like to see more programs which try to be applicable to a broad variety of non-coding domains, which actually occupy the majority of the work that people do on computers (working with images, working with spreadsheets, working with documents and pages, working with 3d spaces, animation, realtime information, etc.), allowing the easy creation of 'domain specific experiences' in these, which is generally impossible or very difficult in most of todays pre-compiled software for these tasks. [I hope that all makes sense to someone :) Would also appreciate any discussion as something along these lines is a side-project of mine atm]
- nickik 14y ago
  I think a lot of that stuff can be done if there are JS implmentation. You want be able to use the importend functions from excel in a browser (or anywhere else) its just made for this kind of stuff. If there are JS you might be able to inlude them into the working process of Light Table. Lets see, its a nice idea.
  - twelvechairs 14y ago
    Yeah. JS might help in this regard, but I guess I am hoping for an system where there isn't the same divide between coding environment and platform being coded for. If you could build excel (or similar) _within_ lighttable - and still allow all sorts of live code testing - that would be a real leap to me.
- ibdknox 14y ago
  We showed examples that relate very cleanly to "normal coding", but what we ultimately want to see is exactly what you're describing. There are so many places where a thin veil over the implementation would be immensely useful, presenting new interfaces for things like working with physics simulations, financial models, etc etc.
bergie 14y ago
I like this concept. Once Light Table is becoming available I will definitely try to make a Flow-Based Programming mode for http://noflojs.org/ http://noflojs.org/

346 points by olauzon 14y ago

As promised, this is the second demo complete with python! For those who can't use vimeo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osLReQSB9F0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osLReQSB9F0

SudarshanP 14y ago
It is so sad that Vimeo is blocked by many Indian ISPs for silly reasons. The whole Internet feels crippled. There must have been at least a dozen videos I wanted to watch today that were recklessly censored. Thanks for the youtube link. I think we need a Redundant Array of Cloud Videos.
- djKianoosh 14y ago
  off topic, but dont feel bad, vimeo and youtube are both blocked at DHS.
  - peterhajas 14y ago
    Do you mean the Department of Homeland Security?
    - djKianoosh 14y ago
      Yes. HQ specifically.
abhaga 14y ago
Thank you for taking time to put it on Youtube also! I really liked the website example. Reaching to the right code in the right file gets cumbersome pretty quickly in a project of even medium size!
Estragon 14y ago
It would be great to see the code used to make these modes.

nebiros 14y ago

RUUUUUUBBBBYYYYY SUUUUPPPOOOORRRTTTTT!

randall 14y ago
Hopefully with the speed he added Python, ruby / rails support is only weeks away too. :)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
stayclassytally 14y ago
I agree! this just screams Ruby/Rails/Sinatra to me. Can't wait for it's release.
gaius 14y ago
Dear Rubyists/rockstar ninjas/brogrammers/whatever you're calling yourselves this week: please stay well away from whatever community develops around Light Table.

gumuz 14y ago

I love it, especially the grouping of files: route + models + templates, in 1 view is something I see a use for. Does anyone know of an editor which can do something similar?

viscanti 14y ago
Plenty of editors offer split view editing. You'll need to actually open the route, model and template files, but it's easy enough to have them all open at the same time. The real challenge here is how they'll handle larger files (real-world production code rarely is that small and clean, you almost always have complex logic and a number of database calls).
- gumuz 14y ago
  isn't it the idea to forget about files, so I can see the models & and views I'm interested in in for a particular workflow. Regardles of where & which file they're located in?

lubutu 14y ago

I don't quite understand what the difference is between Light Table's modes and IDEs' plugins. Domain-specific components are exactly what make IDEs 'integrated'; without them they are generalised editors. But there is absolutely no difference, as far as I can tell, between Light Table's new SQL mode and an SQL IDE plugin. I'm personally much more fond of the Unix 'tool approach', in which there are no task-specific modes or plugins, but tools can still be composed ad hoc, as in Plan 9's Acme.

ibdknox 14y ago
Sure, anything can be built given enough time :) The difference is that those modes can be built in a couple of hours with arbitrary UI and virtually any interactions you can think of. It's hard for me to imagine being able to build any of the things I showed in say Eclipse in any reasonable amount of time. The idea is that Light Table will be built from the ground up to support very dynamic environmental contexts in which you can place anything.
- ori_b 14y ago
  So, an IDE with a better plugin API?
- artursapek 14y ago
  So Light Table is a rapid prototyping tool?
  - derefr 14y ago
    Light Table is a rapid tool prototyping platform :)
- Arelius 14y ago
  But, instead compare that to Emacs, these are exactly the sorts of things people can and do do in emacs in reasonable amounts of time. And exactly why emacs has many great tools, from paredit-mode to SLIME. The comparison to emacs isn't meant as a slight to LightTable either, but please, let's not forgot the past when creating the future.

pwny 14y ago

Boy am I happy I pledged for Light Table. And the benchmark mode looks so freaking great. I'm getting excited just thinking about it. I don't think I'll be able to wait until the early beta. ARGHH!

mcrittenden 14y ago

With all of the demos and information posted I still have trouble visualizing this working for real-world applications. A specific example: in the Python/Flask demo, functions were added to the current view as it was called. How would this work in a more complex case with calls to many functions, each which call many more functions (and so on), each belonging to different objects, etc.? The view would quickly become a huge list of functions and code blocks, most of which you probably don't need to see at any given time, and at this point it's no more useful than plain old user-curated tabs. That's just one example. The same conceptual problems pop up for stuff like on-the-fly code execution (what if your code depends on user input or many SQL queries or files that may or may not exist at that point), benchmark mode (benchmarking a complex app is obviously a lot more complicated than just running two code blocks side by side), etc. I know this is just a demo and it's all very early in the process, and I'm not saying that this should be a solved problem yet, but I just can't picture in my head a way that this could ever be a solved problem as long as LightTable remains somewhat similar to its current state.

option_greek 14y ago
They could display it as a graph with function names like a call stack. Most IDEs support most of the features shown in a piecemeal fashion but Light table seem to have the features more integrated, reducing the friction between coding and testing.
ibdknox 14y ago
Right now it goes at most one level deep into the call tree to prevent what you're talking about. The thinking I've had so far is that you then have a few options. You could go to one of the specific functions and say I want to see everything, you could go to a specific token and bring up its definition, or you could "focus" it to switch the starting point to that function. I think any of those could work, but I haven't tested them yet :) To your second point the normal caveats of a replish environment will apply to any code execution stuff :) And the benchmarking mode was a simple example for working against functions once you already know they're the bottleneck. In a real application you probably need help getting there. I agree and I think a big part of the job ahead is to understand how we can ensure these sorts of experiences mesh and flow together when working on something larger. Fortunately, Light Table itself provides a great project to prove that on.

DasIch 14y ago

The first time I heard about Light Table I was rather critical but this begins to look like something that could really replace vim for me. This is rather surprising given my general distaste of IDEs.

moe 14y ago
Same here. As much as I like vim - it remains software from the stone age and it seems absurd that our main work interface (editor and shell) still consists of an emulated 1980s text-mode terminal. LightTable looks like a major step in the right direction. I think the best indicator for success will be when the vim/emacs-diehards start porting their respective shortcuts and functionality over. I could very well see this fundamental approach (modular/dynamically expanding interface) become the new paradigm for editors and (hopefully) terminals if the author manages to make the prototype versatile and hacker-friendly enough. We've really been entrapped inside ancient TTY-emulations and inadequate GUI-widget sets for way too long.
- DanI-S 14y ago
  The thing that draws me to Vim, really, is the extensibility. There's a steep learning curve to creating a powerful Vim extension, but there are still a huge number of them. Imagine if Light Table can make editor extension something you can do per project! I probably have a unique preferred layout of Vim splits and tabs that I use for each codebase I work with. Being able to take this further, telling the editor which parts of code are significant and in which ways they go together, I'd have so much less mental overhead. I love the idea that I could navigate our current codebase by endpoint, jumping to the account management portion of our API, automatically having the relevant back-end code and unit tests on-screen, along with benchmark info and test results. Since we adhere to general conventions at least within a project, there's no reason this can't be done.
  - mattbriggs 14y ago
    vims extensibility is a commonly cited positive, but I totally do not understand it, since pretty much every editor imaginable is extensible in similar fashion, and pretty much all of the use better languages then vim. By contrast, emacs is basically an application platform that ships with an editor implementation, and eclipse is a platform for building editors. It's not that vim isn't extensible, it is, just not as much as other alternatives, and nowhere near as easily as most of its competition. IMO the real advantage of vim is that it is a highly efficient and productive tool that works great without any customization, and is available everywhere without installation. Which is pretty much the opposite of the above opinion.

kitsune_ 14y ago

This somehow reminds me of Microsoft's "strategy", or whatever you want to call it (VisualStudio LightSwitch, SharePoint Designer)?

bnegreve 14y ago

Being specific is not a feature, this is what you do when you have no other way to solve a problem. The ambitious challenge raised by Light Table was to generalize Bret Victor's ideas to general programming, if they are unable to do this, I'll stick to my IDE.

qiemem 14y ago
Bret Victor's ideas apply differently to different problem domains. This was very apparent from his talk. It looks like Chris is trying to build a platform that makes applying Bret's ideas very simple and natural. Also, I assume that many of these modes will be generalized and available out of the box, so all you have to do is the pick the one that best suits your needs for any given task.
simonb 14y ago
It generalizes them the lisp way: by building machines that build machines.
espeed 14y ago
In case anyone is wondering: "Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII)
- d0mine 14y ago
  Thank you for the link. Make tools to be extensions of our bodies via immediate feedback is a useful idea (it is not the main point of talk, but it stands out to me). As a side note: It might be even be literally true for physical tools i.e., a brain can physically change to see the tool as an extension of the hand (from a study about ape, its brain, and a stick).

ulf 14y ago

Looks more promising every time! While I like the idea to not work on your stuff as files, I have a question in that regard: Do you have specific plans on how to incorporate version control when not primarily relying on files?

ibdknox 14y ago
It's still serializing to files - it has to, our workflows are entirely dependent on them :)
- socksy 14y ago
  Are you developing Light Table using Light Table? If not, is that a future aim?

frou_dh 14y ago

If you come up with some new code in a "scratchpad" area and want to save it, where will it go? In a new file? Appended to the end of an existing file? Similarly, if you edit one of the "supporting" functions that appear and want to save those changes, will they be saved in-place (e.g. line 217-241) in whichever file that function is from?

islon 14y ago

This is amazing! I can't wait to use it.

kamaal 14y ago

I don't mind if the future is specific. But its really wrong to say IDE's like Eclipse don't do one specific task well. Eclipse really makes Java programming very easy. And I can tell you minus Eclipse programming in Java would be a very frustrating experience, given the verbosity, configuration mess and XML's all over the place. Eclipse these days is advanced enough to really blur the difference between and novice and a expert Java programmers. So by any measure I would say eclipse already does what light table aims to do. The only problem with eclipse is its too heavy, chews a lot of memory and becomes very heavy as things go on. What we expect from light table is really what things like Emacs and Vim already are, plus what they miss. Which is modern GUI candy, easy configuration, availability of packages, stuff like refactoring, bench marking, auto complete and Intellisense easily available out of the box. Along with evolution with modern needs and demands. So that is why what we really needed was an Emacs + all that I mentioned. I think it will be nice if at some point requirements are frozen for Light table. Because things like this really slip into Second systems effect easily. According to me Light Table must be Emacs for the Modern Generation. Anything else, and it won't be impressive. A thin editor, extensible by lisp. All lisp and other Emacs editor goodies but with all the modern demands. We already have enough of other kind of IDE's.

ibdknox 14y ago
These were examples of extensions to make a point and not at all what we'll be focusing on. What we're making sure of is that the platform for such things exists and enables all of the things that old UI's and such don't allow. I think the parallel to emacs is a good one and while I certainly won't say at this point that we'll be the "modern emacs", it's our hope we can come close.
- mattbriggs 14y ago
  out of curiosity, is js going to be your "elisp"?
  - phyzome 14y ago
    Clojurescript, actually -- a Clojure dialect that compiles to JS. Well, Clojure too, on the server side of things.

haliax 14y ago

LOVE the web example! Keep up the good work!

JimmyL 14y ago

>> The future of tools isn't in a better Eclipse or Visual Studio, it's in easily created domain specific experiences. How is that goal different from that of the Eclipse platform (http://www.eclipse.org/platform/overview.php http://www.eclipse.org/platform/overview.php) - a common base where people can develop individual add-ons to suit the domain they're working on? Eclipse platform and LT clearly have different interaction models and technologies, but from the leading quote of the article, the same goal. Writing Java in Eclipse is, as many have said, a great experience (in the continuum of Java-development experience). But you know what else is pretty good? PyDev (http://pydev.org/ http://pydev.org/) - a Python IDE that's written on the Eclipse platform. It uses the same interaction models and designs as Eclipse for Java, but it's also got a whole bunch of bits that are just targeted at Python development. There's also a tool (the name of which I don't recall) that our DBA uses for all his database management that's written on the Eclipse platform. I'm all for specific - I use PyCharm every day, which does one thing (Python development) really well. But I think calling out Eclipse like the parent article does is wrong. It too can be a platform for "easily created domain specific experiences"; it's just a different one with a different paradigm.

spiffworks 14y ago
> But you know what else is pretty good? PyDev It's not. It's really not. I've heard good things about PyCharm, but the best environment for Python that I have seen so far is Emacs. And Light Table definitely looks like an improvement on that. My only concern with this is the speed. I want this to have the same response time as Emacs or Vim. Then there would be no reason not to use it.
- JimmyL 14y ago
  I specifically chose the description "pretty good" (as opposed to "great" or something more flowery) for PyDev, because I think that best summarizes it. It's got a number of issues with it (and it's sometimes as slow as a dog), but for the hobby developer it's more than enough. Once I started working in Python and spending 30-something hours/week in the environment, its flaws started to overcome its benefits (namely: it was free, and I knew how to use it), and it was time to move to PyCharm...which is also slow, unless you throw a few gigs of RAM at it and at which point it becomes amazing.

gosub 14y ago

So the future is the Unix philosophy.

eragnew 14y ago

Light Table looks amazing. Simply amazing.

GlennS 14y ago

It's a pretty impressive demo. It looks like it could be the mother of all scratchpads. It looks like it might have a bit of a scary learning curve though. I can certainly think of a lot of ideas of what I might try to implement with such an approach. Really any existing code inspection/analysis approach. I'm thinking some sort of view onto Powershell providers could be interesting. Maybe exception lookups in the code as your browse through an error log. Definitely a regex tester utility: does your string match the regex? Do parts of it match part of the regex? What's an example string that would match? Can we display all of this dynamically in real time?

ashliana 14y ago

More of a meta comment on the future being specific and how it is all about creating more domain-specific tools vs generalized tools... I think that's really a common property in any complex, highly powerful system. Think about the brain, the economy, DNA, a corporation even... etc. Domain specificity is the past and the present, too!

spiffworks 14y ago

As an Indian who cannot access Vimeo, this is what I see. http://i.imgur.com/ojTVQ.png http://i.imgur.com/ojTVQ.png May I ask for a link to the video on another service?

ibdknox 14y ago
look at my comment below.
- spiffworks 14y ago
  Thank you!
pavel_lishin 14y ago
Aw, that is a very boring "access denied" message.

krupan 14y ago

The flask example is the really pertinent one to me. Those were all the views that you need when working on a web app and it would be awesome to have them all come up automatically like that. It's possible to make emacs show you all those views by manually opening up frames and finding the right code, and emacs can even render html (but really, use your browser of choice for that). I'm sure it would be possible to write the elisp to have it do it all almost as automagically and smoothly as light-table (but not with rounded corners). The problem is, if I'm a python expert writing python web-apps, breaking out elisp to script up an environment like this is just too daunting. Instead I usually just keep checking back at the emacs wiki to see if anyone else has done it for me... (should I admit that?) Is Light Table going to solve that problem? Unfortunately this blog post and the videos don't demonstrate how you create these modes. Do you have to become a clojure, clojurescript, html5, css expert?

pavel_lishin 14y ago
I spent this morning fiddling with elisp to get emacs to do something I wanted. On the one hand, it's incredibly annoying, considering that I don't know anything about elisp. On the other hand, I figured out what I needed, and now it's a little easier. On the gripping hand, there's zero chance that I'll be trying to replicate that functionality in emacs. Even with the wiki, and it's random ~/Desktop/elisp_notes.ver2.txt feel, isn't that helpful.
nickik 14y ago
Im guessing but you should be able to use any JVM language on the server and any language that compiles to JS on the client. If you want to do more visual stuff then the framework allready does you problebly want get around html and css. With some work it would probebly be possible to make the Server IPA more general.

cwilson 14y ago

I'm specifically excited about Light Table (and the second half of this video where he dives into Python/Flask), because as a front-end guy, I generally spend most of my time in views/templates. I occasionally have to dive into models however, and it seems to me Light Table would help me navigate something I consider a bit of a wild west much more efficiently, resulting in learning much faster. Basically, I'm excited about Light Table because I think it will help me become a better programmer.

its_so_on 14y ago

March of the specific. Google didn't win by being the best general-purpose search, where people go to look for anything on the Internet. It won by being the best for searching only um, okay not the best example. Facebook didn't just raise 14billion at a valuation of 100billion by being the best general-purpose social network, where just anyone would have a profile. It won by being the best network for, uh.. Okay, not the best example. Well, take a revolutionary new product like the iPad. It doesn't have hundreds or thousands of apps to do uh, hold on. I'm sure that somewhere there's the ONE thing that it does. Uh, it's a screen? Look, step back. There's only one thing you can do in Photoshop. I mean there's just one thing to use Ubuntu for. Sorry, I meant that when you say the word 'Harvard' everyone knows what the ONE thing that they teach is! Okay, look, these might not be the BEST examples in the world. Take a pair of jeans. There is ONE time and ONE place to, uh. Fuck. I'm done. If the future is anything like the present, nobody even knows what the fuck business Amazon is in anymore. http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AMZN+Interactive#symbol=amzn;range=5y;compare=;indicator=volume;charttype=area;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=off;source=undefined http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AMZN+Interactive#symbol=a...; The future is the very opposite of the word "specific".

prospero 14y ago
All of your examples are gestalts. They're not single seamless abstractions, they're patchworks that are more than the sum of their parts. That's precisely what is being proposed here: a platform for creating a development environment that is more than the sum of its parts. Something that gives you composable pieces that can be fit together into something that maps directly onto your problem space. Is this really so unclear? I can't picture the hypothetical product that you're arguing against.
- its_so_on 14y ago
  Well, I looked at the "gestalt" Wikipedia article. As near as I can make out, you're saying that Google in fact highly tailors its search-for-geneticists, which has nothing to do with its search-for-bakers: it seems like a single whole, but isn't. But that patently isn't so. Patently, every niche runs off the same algorithms. Equally, bankers' circle of friends use the same facebook that teenagers' circle of friends use: it isn't multitudinous facebooks that seem to be one but are really quite different. Likewise jeans in jeans-and-a-blazer are obviously the same jeans as jeans in jeans-and-a-tshirt. iPad apps are built with the very same SDK and frequently have very similar UI/UX. There is literally nothing domain-specific about objective c. I will grant you that Amazon's cloud stuff is very different from its merchandizing operations, but beyond that I don't see where the big difference between shipping books and shipping dry cereal is, which is two businesses that Amazon is now in. In fact, if anything, Amazon's cloud services are the OPPOSITE of domain-specific: Reddit, which includes ZERO filesharing, is on it, and so is Dropbox, which is basically ONLY filesharing. If you look at what Amazon is actually exposing with AWS, you will see it is as generic and non-domain-specific as theoretically possible. Heck, they've even abstracted away the individual server! (So the last bastion of something that might separate a database-heavy user site from a disk-heavy backup site disappears). I would say that their whole movement is towards being non-specific. You probably understand what you're saying better than I do, so please do explain. Because from where I'm standing, it seems the whole march of the Internet is in busting domain-specific-languages and approaches. Every time a cute hack with CSS hits the front page, it's proof that CSS derives its power precisely from not being a domain specific language. Off-hand, can you name a single domain-specific language or approach that has really 'won'? You may know more about this than I do, so it is certainly a genuine question.

frendiversity 14y ago

I'd rather see Light Table features integrated into Eclipse, as creating something as fully featured as Eclipse is... ...going to end up being Eclipse. So either a massive wheel is being reinvented, or Light Table will be absent of all standard IDE features and consist of the flashy neato Code Bubbles stuff and not much more. That said, I say develop the hell out of the Light Table concept for all the "new age" (circa 196X) dynamic coder people since their IDEs tend to suck, and let's hope it becomes a standard and we can implement it all in everything else. :)

philip1209 14y ago

I was just on Subtle Patterns this morning, and I now recognize where Chris grabbed the two background aluminum images!

anoplus 14y ago

Recently I was thinking maybe software industry is too much obsessive about tool making. I wouldn't mind spending much more time and effort using a bad IDE re-factoring bad code that works good and cures cancer. I don't really care how awesome the static analysis tool I am using, or how awesome the meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta programming language I am using if I work on pointless product. Maybe I am wrong and those tools are the only way for real breakthroughs in bioinformatics. what do you think?

nickik 14y ago
This 'problem' is old. Even the Hackers in the 60s didn't often do anything 'real'. The made tools to make it easier to make other tools, and so on. The think is that WHEN you want to develop something real you want to have these tools ready to go. With your aditued there will not be that much progress, since everybody would have just said 'mmhh lets not develop a good compiler for C lets write assembler'. In my opinion as long as people develop better tools (languages, IDEs, compilers, debuggers) there is need for them. If one guy spends a couple of month on a Tool, how long will it take until the time saved is 'recoverd' by the users of that tool? Making tools yileds economic benefit, just like in the real word a maschine that does something better or faster will result in economic benefit. That is not do say there is never mal-investment. Somebody might spend a long time developing something and nobody will use it, programming related or not. This however is not an argument for no innovation.

negrolious 14y ago

Eclipse with http://xtext.org http://xtext.org is an outstanding platform for domain-specific languages and domain-specific tools. I don't know any tool which comes even close.

skrebbel 14y ago

A 'macro system for tools'. Isn't this what the academic bozos call Language Workbenches? Extensible tool-building platforms for DSLs are hardly anything new. Reading things like this, i sometimes worry that the HN-circling web crowd is reinventing things that others invented just a few years ago. Like some sort of collective not-invented-here syndrome. E.g. Check out MetaEdit+ - their website isn't Silicon Valley Sexy, but the tool is amazing. And has been, for the past 10+ years. http://www.metacase.com/mep/ http://www.metacase.com/mep/ Now, there's plenty new and well-rehashed ideas in Light Table. I'll be buying a license, probably. But the insight in this article isn't very new at all.

radicalbyte 14y ago
> Reading things like this, i sometimes worry that > the HN-circling web crowd is reinventing things > that others invented just a few years ago. The difference in this case is that the HN web crowd are targeting their fellow programmers, and not the "Enterprise" crowd. I've been following the DSL tooling scene, and it's horrible. Think closed source, expensive and targeted at the Enterprise (or specific engineering disciplines). The community is full of MDA (model-driven-architecture) types: too often is the focus on increasing complexity (for ego boosting / job security) instead of simplicity and accessibility. The HN crowd are pretty much the polar opposite: the focus is on simplicity and scale. Sharing knowledge, instead of locking it up for fun and "profit". That's why I like it here :)
- vinodkd 14y ago
  > The community is full of MDA (model-driven-architecture) types: too often is the focus on increasing complexity (for ego boosting / job security) instead of simplicity and accessibility. > .. instead of locking it up for fun and "profit". still, if you ignore the MDA and executable uml silliness, there's quite a few ideas that can be picked from that closed space, imo.
  - nickik 14y ago
    > still, if you ignore the MDA and executable uml silliness, there's quite a few ideas that can be picked from that closed space, imo. Thats what Light Table does, isn't it? If not it will at least allow you to implement these ideas in a simple way.

ckluis 14y ago

As a non-developer. I would love this for php & wordpress. Here me out: the people who aren't in IDE's all day could benefit the most from this. They don't know where the functions are or even how to find them sometimes. I resort to google 9/10 when looking for how some functions. This has huge applications for helping non-programmers become programmers.

anigbrowl 14y ago

What I would like is a way to do more graphical programming, like this: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=reaktor&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1280&bih=909&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=djS8T6e3HYfZiQKF0cTqDQ https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=reaktor&ion=1&... or this: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=reaktor&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1280&bih=909&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=djS8T6e3HYfZiQKF0cTqDQ#um=1&hl=en&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=synthmaker&oq=synthmaker&aq=f&aqi=g1g-S9&aql=&gs_l=img.3..0j0i24l9.110954.112114.0.112243.10.8.0.2.2.0.104.671.7j1.8.0...0.0.xXcDTgxvp38&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=a40ca22810824758&biw=1280&bih=909 https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=reaktor&ion=1&... (which latter includes both C-like and assembly code modules, as well as extensive GUI manipulation capabilities). When I was learning to code, and still sometimes, what annoys me about typing is that I don't know what I don't know. With graphical programming, having predefined modules with discoverable inputs and outputs encourages me to try connecting things together on a what-if basis to a much greater degree than a textual environment. This is what I find very attractive about the way Light Table is going; a lot of the time I want to build things but not necessarily to write code.

twelvechairs 14y ago

The key line for me here is that the future is in 'easily created domain specific experiences'. I think this is very eloquently stated and can't agree more. I like what Light table is trying to do, hoewver it is still working in pretty much the same 'domain' space as existing IDE's ('code'), and trying to improve on the 'easily created... experiences' part. As the post is waxing lyrical, my piece to add to the broad-concept discussion is that I'd really like to see more programs which try to be applicable to a broad variety of non-coding domains, which actually occupy the majority of the work that people do on computers (working with images, working with spreadsheets, working with documents and pages, working with 3d spaces, animation, realtime information, etc.), allowing the easy creation of 'domain specific experiences' in these, which is generally impossible or very difficult in most of todays pre-compiled software for these tasks. [I hope that all makes sense to someone :) Would also appreciate any discussion as something along these lines is a side-project of mine atm]

nickik 14y ago
I think a lot of that stuff can be done if there are JS implmentation. You want be able to use the importend functions from excel in a browser (or anywhere else) its just made for this kind of stuff. If there are JS you might be able to inlude them into the working process of Light Table. Lets see, its a nice idea.
- twelvechairs 14y ago
  Yeah. JS might help in this regard, but I guess I am hoping for an system where there isn't the same divide between coding environment and platform being coded for. If you could build excel (or similar) _within_ lighttable - and still allow all sorts of live code testing - that would be a real leap to me.
ibdknox 14y ago
We showed examples that relate very cleanly to "normal coding", but what we ultimately want to see is exactly what you're describing. There are so many places where a thin veil over the implementation would be immensely useful, presenting new interfaces for things like working with physics simulations, financial models, etc etc.

bergie 14y ago

I like this concept. Once Light Table is becoming available I will definitely try to make a Flow-Based Programming mode for http://noflojs.org/ http://noflojs.org/