8 ms·

Light Table - Embracing Abstraction

163 points by bpierre 14y ago

makmanalp 14y ago
I was skeptical of buying into the light table idea until now. Now I see it for what it is: A programmable debugger with a dashboard for your software, as well as an editor, the latter part being less important. It's like if gdb had a baby with some visualization app. The debugger already is omniscient in terms of what is going on within the program, but it's inept at showing it to you. It's too low-level in that it doesn't know what specific entities are important in your program. It knows addresses, variables, maybe objects. But you have a mental model and instead of trying to get your mental model into low level terms you can program it to have some notion of what to display.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  Most debuggers are technically not omniscient because they don't trace history. IntelliTrace is better in this regard, but you can see projects like LightTable taking that to the next level.
- agumonkey 14y ago
  Reminded me of Minsky's quote about the null program : http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/12 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/12
- moconnor 14y ago
  I've spent the last decade writing debuggers; they are anything but omniscient. It's a miracle that they work at all, frankly. In principle gdb could look at everything that's going on, but in practice doing so would (a) hit a bug in the compiler's debug output and fail, and (b) take forever for any program worth debugging.
  - makmanalp 14y ago
    Interesting! The point I was trying to make wasn't that it knows everything everything, but it knows a lot more useful information than you.
cbaleanu 14y ago
Nice to see Javascript being used in the movie.
pnachbaur 14y ago
This is exceedingly cool. I'd love to see this in action for something that isn't a game (preferably my own project haha). Looking forward to the release!
sergiotapia 14y ago
Cool demo I guess, but I have no idea how this could fit into current workflows or even be applied to traditional applications or websites. Anyone care to enlighten me?
- squidsoup 14y ago
  The web development workflow is something that will be getting a lot of consideration in Lighttable - Chris Granger is the author of Noir which is the closest thing to a web 'framework' in the Clojure world.
- dm3 14y ago
  Imagine you could create custom dashboards and debugging views for your domain types and your domain logic. Not just tailing the log and navigating some variables in a standard debugger. I believe this will help immensely when approached from the right side, e.g. projects split into separate components with each having its own IDE setup (world, if you may) developed from the ground up together with the component itself.
tisme 14y ago
This is really neat. I see a lot of connections to Borlands visual C builder. Create a canvas, drag elements onto the resulting form and change their properties and code up actions. Of course this example here uses 'clojure' but there are a lot of similarities. Something like that could make writing web applications much easier than it is right now. Interactive web application development could be a real game changer.
veb 14y ago
I'd really really like to watch this video, and countless of other awesome tech videos -- but I can't, there's no captions. As someone who is hard of hearing, I have to wonder how many things I end up missing out on when I can't watch things like this. Grr.
- tisme 14y ago
  The video doesn't show any time marks so you'll have to interpolate the locations. -- So the first thing I thought we would do is create a little custom git widget that shows the files modified in our repository. So we add a custom object. And we're going to write some clojure script code just to hold the state of our (circle??) the git status We just need a way then to get that So we ask the server for it And... here we're just creating some html representation of our list of files And then when we save We're going to make sure we update So if we run this We should see Yes, there we go we have a list of modified files We can add some css to make it look prettier And now I can just move this wherever we want I'll put it down here And let's actually open a file and modify it and prove that our widget is actually working So, we have server.clj here And when I save it Yes, there we go It's changed And if I remove that modification, then it goes away, great! Then I thought we should do something a bit more interesting than that. I've been working on a game with my little brother So let's build an environment to play that game in and work on it It's written in Javascript so we're going to need a canvas element So that we can put the game on the canvas Canvas by default isn't visible so you dont't see it immediately So Let's give it a background, black just so we can actually see that we added something. here we go And we'll move this over to this this side so don't have it in the middle of our workspace And that as well Let's run the game to make sure this is all working as expected There's the game there is the javascript file execute it there we go Now we have the game running, You can see I can play it here You can move around, some little bad guy shooting me. Cool! now I talked about being able to build, to bring your abstractions into the environment Let's control the game from light table I add another custom object We're going to create start and stop buttons for the game We start writing the clojure script here we create a little function to create a button That has a label and an action And here is our init which just returns the html that we want it to to be represented as And you can see after executing it you get a start and stop Some css here , that's a little too big Let's actually shrink the font size a bit that's still too big.. 11 60 Great, now if I click stop, he stops moving there you go And If I click start he starts moving again And you can see what this init function is doing is calling our javascript code Move this guy down here So let's take this up a notch Let's actually bring one of the abstractions from the game directly in. So games are usually composed of entities that get drawn to the canvas So let's create a list of all the entities to do that We need some state for our entities And a way obviously to add and remove them And then we need a representation of them in html We have this little item function We're setting our on-add and on-remove functions within our game to our add and remove Execute this and Do the magic of some data binding here We'll see that Every time something gets shot a new entity is added to the canvas So if I shoot this guy, he actually explodes into a bunch of shrapnel let me show this there you go so there is a bunch of shrapnel that's been added And as it sort of fades away it goes away again Cool! So we've actually created a little environment for our game here the whole thing was less than about 50 lines of code And it was completely trivial to build there you go! Fun little way to show how You can extend light table
mjcohenw 14y ago
Also, please spellcheck!
mempko 14y ago
It is clear they have no idea what an abstraction is. Abstractions deliberately throw away information. He is instead making widgets which reveal more information. What he calls abstractions are nothing of the sort.
- koide 14y ago
  He isn't calling the widgets he creates abstractions. He is saying that LightTable allows you through these widgets to dynamically control and display the existing abstractions of your code.
  - jmilloy 14y ago
    I still don't get it. What existing abstractions did he display? What were they abstractions of?
    - agentultra 14y ago
      It is because he is using, "nominalizations." (A word which is a caricature of the very idea it represents). It is difficult to explain what he is talking about because he isn't talking about anything concrete. The word, "abstractions," is loaded with implicit meaning that he does not explain particularly well. I've found this post quite useful: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/zombie-nouns/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/zombie-nouns...
    - eternalban 14y ago
      You didn't note the abstracted component connectivity bit, where buttons got hooked up to other components and used as commanders?
      - jmilloy 14y ago
        Can you concretely state what the abstraction you are describing is? In particular, what details does it hide or factor out?
      - deleted 14y ago
davidp 14y ago
> we are not the recipe writers we were 20 years ago - that instead we are "abstractioners" > we have to know far more than just the basic consturcts [sic] of the language and things like IO Did anyone else find these annoying? I recall building a great deal of abstraction into my systems 20 years ago, and we certainly used frameworks at various layers of the system. We had to know far more than basic language constructs and IO. Today's systems and frameworks are more available (open-source) and differently targeted (e.g. cloud-scale problems), but they're still just building abstractions on what came before, just like us old fogies were doing 20 years ago. The problems and solutions are not qualitatively different -- they just have different scale and connectivity. All that said, Light Table seems pretty cool. But it's not evidence of deeper insight than what came before.
- jgrahamc 14y ago
  Yes, I found that annoying. But it's not uncommon when reading stuff written by programmers who make extensive use of JavaScript. For whatever reason it seems to have attracted people who don't have much breadth or depth of programming experience yet at the same time like to make grand statements. It's interesting that the author, who is speaking about things that were happening 20 years ago, graduated from college in 2008 (http://www.chris-granger.com/resume/ http://www.chris-granger.com/resume/) and thus 20 years ago he was likely a very small child. This combination of lack of depth and yet grandeur is seen in other projects and is annoying because it means that one is forced to wade through a lot of noise to understand projects like nodejs, couchdb, etc. And it does the people who write like that a disservice. Rather then overselling their weak knowledge they should point out the cool stuff in what they are doing and let that speak for itself. It's counterproductive to pretend to be smarter than you are.
  - mansoor-s 14y ago
    You don't realize the irony in what you said! You complain about JavaScript developers making grand statements and you are making a grand statement about ALL JavaScript developer! tsk tsk tsk
    - 14y ago
agentultra 14y ago
I think Mr. Granger should refrain from using inaccurate remarks about the history of programming. Light Table is neat but it is not the first attempt at an interactive development environment. His ideas were quite common 30+ years ago (20 years ago would have been right about the time when this style of programming started falling out of vogue). Alan Kay does a far better job than I can in explaining some of this history: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc&feature=youtube_gdata_player http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc&feature=youtu... Update I wasn't being terribly fair. Granger might simply not have been aware. In that case I hope he sees my comment and watches the above video. :)
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  When I gave my talk on live programming in OOPSLA/Onward! 2007, one of the gang of four (of Design Patterns fame) criticized me on not mentioning smalltalk enough. You know, I think we are all aware of Smalltalk and its ability to reload code on the fly, or the "live" eToys demo Alan Kay was giving in the late 90s/early 00s (I saw it the first time at his ECOOP 2000 banquet speech). But there really is something special in Light Table (and other projects, including my own) that go beyond that; they are working on a practical tool for programmers, they are really focusing on an interactive UX, which to be clear, Smalltalk environments never really had. Yes, get your history and citation right to avoid being flamed. But no, it didn't end with Smalltalk (or Lisp, or whatever) and we are not just going back to that.
  - tisme 14y ago
    > interactive UX, which to be clear, Smalltalk environments never really had Smalltalk had an interactive UX in 1986 or so when I used it first for some CAD stuff. Or is there a special definition of 'interactive UX' which would rule out what smalltalk offered back then?
    - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
      You know, people sometimes say Visual C++ is interactive UX because of the freaking form builder. I guess my argument is more about a certain level of interactivity that is missing; its not black and white to be sure.
moconnor 14y ago
I just watched this right after reading Bret Victor's Learnable Programming essay (http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/ http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/). The dissonance between Bret's visions and where even a quite progressive modern IDE is at disturbed me deeply. Nothing that Chris showed was "trivial" when seen from the perspective of how things might be rather than how Eclipse does things.

163 points by bpierre 14y ago

I was skeptical of buying into the light table idea until now. Now I see it for what it is: A programmable debugger with a dashboard for your software, as well as an editor, the latter part being less important. It's like if gdb had a baby with some visualization app. The debugger already is omniscient in terms of what is going on within the program, but it's inept at showing it to you. It's too low-level in that it doesn't know what specific entities are important in your program. It knows addresses, variables, maybe objects. But you have a mental model and instead of trying to get your mental model into low level terms you can program it to have some notion of what to display.

seanmcdirmid 14y ago
Most debuggers are technically not omniscient because they don't trace history. IntelliTrace is better in this regard, but you can see projects like LightTable taking that to the next level.
agumonkey 14y ago
Reminded me of Minsky's quote about the null program : http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/12 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/12
moconnor 14y ago
I've spent the last decade writing debuggers; they are anything but omniscient. It's a miracle that they work at all, frankly. In principle gdb could look at everything that's going on, but in practice doing so would (a) hit a bug in the compiler's debug output and fail, and (b) take forever for any program worth debugging.
- makmanalp 14y ago
  Interesting! The point I was trying to make wasn't that it knows everything everything, but it knows a lot more useful information than you.

cbaleanu 14y ago

Nice to see Javascript being used in the movie.

pnachbaur 14y ago

This is exceedingly cool. I'd love to see this in action for something that isn't a game (preferably my own project haha). Looking forward to the release!

sergiotapia 14y ago

Cool demo I guess, but I have no idea how this could fit into current workflows or even be applied to traditional applications or websites. Anyone care to enlighten me?

squidsoup 14y ago
The web development workflow is something that will be getting a lot of consideration in Lighttable - Chris Granger is the author of Noir which is the closest thing to a web 'framework' in the Clojure world.
dm3 14y ago
Imagine you could create custom dashboards and debugging views for your domain types and your domain logic. Not just tailing the log and navigating some variables in a standard debugger. I believe this will help immensely when approached from the right side, e.g. projects split into separate components with each having its own IDE setup (world, if you may) developed from the ground up together with the component itself.

tisme 14y ago

This is really neat. I see a lot of connections to Borlands visual C builder. Create a canvas, drag elements onto the resulting form and change their properties and code up actions. Of course this example here uses 'clojure' but there are a lot of similarities. Something like that could make writing web applications much easier than it is right now. Interactive web application development could be a real game changer.

veb 14y ago

I'd really really like to watch this video, and countless of other awesome tech videos -- but I can't, there's no captions. As someone who is hard of hearing, I have to wonder how many things I end up missing out on when I can't watch things like this. Grr.

tisme 14y ago
The video doesn't show any time marks so you'll have to interpolate the locations. -- So the first thing I thought we would do is create a little custom git widget that shows the files modified in our repository. So we add a custom object. And we're going to write some clojure script code just to hold the state of our (circle??) the git status We just need a way then to get that So we ask the server for it And... here we're just creating some html representation of our list of files And then when we save We're going to make sure we update So if we run this We should see Yes, there we go we have a list of modified files We can add some css to make it look prettier And now I can just move this wherever we want I'll put it down here And let's actually open a file and modify it and prove that our widget is actually working So, we have server.clj here And when I save it Yes, there we go It's changed And if I remove that modification, then it goes away, great! Then I thought we should do something a bit more interesting than that. I've been working on a game with my little brother So let's build an environment to play that game in and work on it It's written in Javascript so we're going to need a canvas element So that we can put the game on the canvas Canvas by default isn't visible so you dont't see it immediately So Let's give it a background, black just so we can actually see that we added something. here we go And we'll move this over to this this side so don't have it in the middle of our workspace And that as well Let's run the game to make sure this is all working as expected There's the game there is the javascript file execute it there we go Now we have the game running, You can see I can play it here You can move around, some little bad guy shooting me. Cool! now I talked about being able to build, to bring your abstractions into the environment Let's control the game from light table I add another custom object We're going to create start and stop buttons for the game We start writing the clojure script here we create a little function to create a button That has a label and an action And here is our init which just returns the html that we want it to to be represented as And you can see after executing it you get a start and stop Some css here , that's a little too big Let's actually shrink the font size a bit that's still too big.. 11 60 Great, now if I click stop, he stops moving there you go And If I click start he starts moving again And you can see what this init function is doing is calling our javascript code Move this guy down here So let's take this up a notch Let's actually bring one of the abstractions from the game directly in. So games are usually composed of entities that get drawn to the canvas So let's create a list of all the entities to do that We need some state for our entities And a way obviously to add and remove them And then we need a representation of them in html We have this little item function We're setting our on-add and on-remove functions within our game to our add and remove Execute this and Do the magic of some data binding here We'll see that Every time something gets shot a new entity is added to the canvas So if I shoot this guy, he actually explodes into a bunch of shrapnel let me show this there you go so there is a bunch of shrapnel that's been added And as it sort of fades away it goes away again Cool! So we've actually created a little environment for our game here the whole thing was less than about 50 lines of code And it was completely trivial to build there you go! Fun little way to show how You can extend light table

mjcohenw 14y ago

Also, please spellcheck!

mempko 14y ago

It is clear they have no idea what an abstraction is. Abstractions deliberately throw away information. He is instead making widgets which reveal more information. What he calls abstractions are nothing of the sort.

koide 14y ago
He isn't calling the widgets he creates abstractions. He is saying that LightTable allows you through these widgets to dynamically control and display the existing abstractions of your code.
- jmilloy 14y ago
  I still don't get it. What existing abstractions did he display? What were they abstractions of?
  - agentultra 14y ago
    It is because he is using, "nominalizations." (A word which is a caricature of the very idea it represents). It is difficult to explain what he is talking about because he isn't talking about anything concrete. The word, "abstractions," is loaded with implicit meaning that he does not explain particularly well. I've found this post quite useful: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/zombie-nouns/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/zombie-nouns...
  - eternalban 14y ago
    You didn't note the abstracted component connectivity bit, where buttons got hooked up to other components and used as commanders?
    - jmilloy 14y ago
      Can you concretely state what the abstraction you are describing is? In particular, what details does it hide or factor out?
    - deleted 14y ago

davidp 14y ago

> we are not the recipe writers we were 20 years ago - that instead we are "abstractioners" > we have to know far more than just the basic consturcts [sic] of the language and things like IO Did anyone else find these annoying? I recall building a great deal of abstraction into my systems 20 years ago, and we certainly used frameworks at various layers of the system. We had to know far more than basic language constructs and IO. Today's systems and frameworks are more available (open-source) and differently targeted (e.g. cloud-scale problems), but they're still just building abstractions on what came before, just like us old fogies were doing 20 years ago. The problems and solutions are not qualitatively different -- they just have different scale and connectivity. All that said, Light Table seems pretty cool. But it's not evidence of deeper insight than what came before.

jgrahamc 14y ago
Yes, I found that annoying. But it's not uncommon when reading stuff written by programmers who make extensive use of JavaScript. For whatever reason it seems to have attracted people who don't have much breadth or depth of programming experience yet at the same time like to make grand statements. It's interesting that the author, who is speaking about things that were happening 20 years ago, graduated from college in 2008 (http://www.chris-granger.com/resume/ http://www.chris-granger.com/resume/) and thus 20 years ago he was likely a very small child. This combination of lack of depth and yet grandeur is seen in other projects and is annoying because it means that one is forced to wade through a lot of noise to understand projects like nodejs, couchdb, etc. And it does the people who write like that a disservice. Rather then overselling their weak knowledge they should point out the cool stuff in what they are doing and let that speak for itself. It's counterproductive to pretend to be smarter than you are.
- mansoor-s 14y ago
  You don't realize the irony in what you said! You complain about JavaScript developers making grand statements and you are making a grand statement about ALL JavaScript developer! tsk tsk tsk
  - 14y ago

agentultra 14y ago

I think Mr. Granger should refrain from using inaccurate remarks about the history of programming. Light Table is neat but it is not the first attempt at an interactive development environment. His ideas were quite common 30+ years ago (20 years ago would have been right about the time when this style of programming started falling out of vogue). Alan Kay does a far better job than I can in explaining some of this history: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc&feature=youtube_gdata_player http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc&feature=youtu... Update I wasn't being terribly fair. Granger might simply not have been aware. In that case I hope he sees my comment and watches the above video. :)

seanmcdirmid 14y ago
When I gave my talk on live programming in OOPSLA/Onward! 2007, one of the gang of four (of Design Patterns fame) criticized me on not mentioning smalltalk enough. You know, I think we are all aware of Smalltalk and its ability to reload code on the fly, or the "live" eToys demo Alan Kay was giving in the late 90s/early 00s (I saw it the first time at his ECOOP 2000 banquet speech). But there really is something special in Light Table (and other projects, including my own) that go beyond that; they are working on a practical tool for programmers, they are really focusing on an interactive UX, which to be clear, Smalltalk environments never really had. Yes, get your history and citation right to avoid being flamed. But no, it didn't end with Smalltalk (or Lisp, or whatever) and we are not just going back to that.
- tisme 14y ago
  > interactive UX, which to be clear, Smalltalk environments never really had Smalltalk had an interactive UX in 1986 or so when I used it first for some CAD stuff. Or is there a special definition of 'interactive UX' which would rule out what smalltalk offered back then?
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    You know, people sometimes say Visual C++ is interactive UX because of the freaking form builder. I guess my argument is more about a certain level of interactivity that is missing; its not black and white to be sure.

moconnor 14y ago

I just watched this right after reading Bret Victor's Learnable Programming essay (http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/ http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/). The dissonance between Bret's visions and where even a quite progressive modern IDE is at disturbed me deeply. Nothing that Chris showed was "trivial" when seen from the perspective of how things might be rather than how Eclipse does things.