7 ms·

A preview of LightTable 0.5

173 points by swah 13y ago

ibdknox 13y ago
Here's a video of the coolest new feature, "watches": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8-b6QEN-rk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8-b6QEN-rk I'm also really excited about the behaviors stuff. It means that the entirety of LT's functionality is described in a datastructure that you could reasonably modify by hand. Here's a gist of default.behaviors: https://gist.github.com/ibdknox/6010853 https://gist.github.com/ibdknox/6010853 The :+ is there because it's stored as a diff, which allows other behaviors files to add and remove functionality based on the order they're loaded.
- nickik 13y ago
  Nice you are probebly reading this, I'll ask here. I have started to use LT for some clojure/clojure script development and real like it. As much as you can like something that new, but I really belive it will replace everything, not just for development but also for 'normal' stuff. There is one simple change that I would really like to see. In the Instarepl and the normal result that are shown 'in line', the result is just printed and not pretty printed, witch makes it almost useless in case of a complex datastructure. Is there any reason for that? Can I change that? Im developing something that looks like a boardgame, and seeing the result of a function with a board in it is almost useless, I still have to pprint it to see whats going on.
  - ibdknox 13y ago
    It's something I was going to work on for 0.5. I do a fair number of things to make lazy seqs not blow everything up and pprinting will force lazy seqs to be realized causing all sorts of nastiness. There may be some decent middle ground in there somewhere though.
    - nickik 13y ago
      Ah, I see how this could be a problem. Maybe show it the like now, and then if you click on it one could pprint it. Does print-length work with pprint?
    - aviflax 13y ago
      Fipp might be relevant: https://github.com/brandonbloom/fipp https://github.com/brandonbloom/fipp
      - ibdknox 13y ago
        Fipp is awesome and I'd love to use it, but there doesn't appear to be a clojurescript implementation of finger trees and last I knew he hadn't solved the print-length/depth problem either.
        brandonbloom 13y ago
        I'll solve the print-length/depth problem, if you write the ClojureScript port of finger trees!
- drcode 13y ago
  I really love the philosophy of LightTable and will make a serious attempt with 0.5 to make it part of my standard dev workflow, but I keep wishing it had a single-stepping debugger built in, especially for clojure code. Am I doing something wrong that I keep depending on such an old-timey feature? Again, thanks for the great work and sorry for talking about even more functionality (the existing LightTable is just so cool that I'd love to have it be even more awesome by including my favorite features :-)
  - ibdknox 13y ago
    I'm not sure I'll do it, but that's my answer for almost everything at this point. Ultimately this is why I'm taking the strategy I am - plugins will be able to do anything I can do quickly and efficiently. Integrating a step-wise debugger won't be a completely trivial amount of work, but I'd be surprised if it took more than a few days and it's something anyone should be able to do :) After 0.5, my goal is to remove us as a bottleneck as quickly as possible and then who knows what'll happen :D
    - moneyrich 13y ago
      how do you even get .4 into table mode? how much has your priorities changed from things like, being a always having the docs available and new editor features like table mode, now that you have to deal with all these customers? what are your thoughts on doing software projects on kickstarter after doing one?
- goldfeld 13y ago
  Will JavaScript be able to script plugins or will it be limited to Clojure?
  - ibdknox 13y ago
    Initially it will likely be easier to write plugins in ClojureScript, but there's nothing preventing JS ones from being written. Before the plugin stuff goes completely public, I'll probably write a little JS shim layer that makes it a bit more natural.
- gcr 13y ago
  > It means that the entirety of LT's functionality is described in a datastructure that you could reasonably modify by hand. I'm confused. Emacs embraced this principle almost forty years ago. Would you mind explaining to me what's novel about LightTable's take on this old idea? Is it "That, But Clojure!"? or "That, But With More Webkit!"? Each of these could be valuable in their own right... Or am I missing something more fundamental?
  - goldfeld 13y ago
    How about, "Turtles all the way down just like Emacs?" I think you don't really have to come up with something revolutionary on top of the Emacs philosophy for it to be a very worthwhile pursuit. The things you mention plus the fact that it's as easy to get started as Sublime (or aims to) makes it a fantastic entry point for lots of new people into a tried, true and powerful way of working. Sadly, it's not open source.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >I'm confused. Emacs embraced this principle almost forty years ago. Would you mind explaining to me what's novel about LightTable's take on this old idea? That it's based on technologies, design sensibilities and UI ideas that weren't around "almost forty years ago".
vosper 13y ago
Great to see things are coming along with LightTable. I was a bit surprised by this: > Lots of things that were blocking the UI no longer are thanks to some magical hackery (given the lack of threads in JS) I thought WebWorkers where designed to alleviate these kinds of issues. It seems like Webkit supports WebWorkers so I'm surprised they weren't used - anyone know the rationale?
- ibdknox 13y ago
  I can't do any kind of IO in a webworker, which means things like indexing the filesystem are impossible there. The vast majority of cases where I need to do background work I also need access to the host. EDIT: I should note that I did start with webworkers for things like auto-complete, but what I'm doing now (spinning up another instance of node) is a lot more powerful and robust. As scary and sad as that may be.
  - airlocksoftware 13y ago
    Kinda tangential, but mentioning threads brought it up. I have core.async on the brain, so I was just wondering if you've looked at it or plan on using it for anything. David Nolen had a cool example using it for event handling.
    - ibdknox 13y ago
      There are places where it'd be useful, no doubt about that. Mainly it will be really useful in the cases where you want to ask a client something "synchronously". For example it'll make doing things like asking a language client where function boundaries are much nicer than the way I was going to have to do it before (waiting for events to be triggered async-style).
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Why to use node instead of Clojure then? This seems just like hacking around a non-existing problem if JS wasn't being used.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
_halgari 13y ago
can we please get paredit? I would probably use it if it had that feature, but until it does, it's basically useless for my day-to-day work.
- olenhad 13y ago
  +1. Clojure without paredit is painful. Its the only reason why I'm unable to use LT for more than a toy.
  - emidln 13y ago
    I actually disabled paredit when I was using vim and have done so again while using emacs+evil. The way I write code i typically simply do opening parens and at the end just jam parens until the rainbow-delimiters start to show up unbalanced (red in my case). If I need to pay attention because I'm not at the end of a top level form, I quickly glance to see which matched parens are flashing as I add each delimiter.
    - wnesensohn 13y ago
      Honest advice: The power of paredit lies not in managing the closing parens. I found that the benefits of paredit show only when you use barf/slurp/split/join. Keep the paredit cheat-sheet around (http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PareditCheatsheet http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PareditCheatsheet) for quick reference, and if you're anything like me and don't like the emacs-meta-ctrl-style key-combos, customize the keys, I've found the defaults to be quite lacking for vim/evil users. Using paredit only for parens-matching feels to me like using only hjkl in vim. While you can use vim this way, you won't fully reap the benefits until you start to use the other movement commands.
      - aerique 13y ago
        Could you do a little write-up on your paredit workflow. Like the post you replied to I've found it mostly annoying to use in normal Emacs and nowadays with evil-mode.
danneu 13y ago
It's easy to spark interest in other developers by converting their Ruby/Python code to Clojure. But LightTable has made it possible for me to recommend an editor that has integrated repl feedback and lets them hit the ground running with Clojure when they ask me how they should get started. Since Lisps are so tool/workflow-dependent, it's just way too easy for a newcomer to dismiss it all after a bad experience because they simply didn't know about electric parens or they never discovered the tight repl feedback loop that makes us so productive. And it makes it frustrating for those of us as well that are trying to convince others to give Lisps a shot since we can't stand over their shoulders. Sometime I'd like to make a well-planned gif (like that on the homepage of http://www.sublimetext.com/ http://www.sublimetext.com/) that gives newcomers a glimpse of a solid workflow to strive for.
- swah 13y ago
  I like that gif too :) One of the few blog posts from jps (st devel) that isn't just a changelog: http://www.sublimetext.com/~jps/animated_gifs_the_hard_way.html http://www.sublimetext.com/~jps/animated_gifs_the_hard_way.h...
frio 13y ago
I use LT productively at the moment and really enjoy it, so thanks ibdknox! I did see on one of the mailing lists that you had spiked up an integration with JSHint, and that might make it into LT 0.5. Is that still the case, or have you deferred that for implementing the plugin framework? I ask because I'd like to push it at work, but many of our developers rely on JSHint/SublimeLinter, and it's much nicer having that integrated into our editors.
- ibdknox 13y ago
  Should be in there. :)
srin 13y ago
This looks great! I'm really trying to use it more, though last time it did feel heavier than sublime. I'm glad that was addressed. Can anyone point me to a good tutorial/example regarding clojure and clojurescript projects in lighttable for windows and mac?
Skinney 13y ago
First of all, I use LightTable for all Clojure development at work (we use it for our tools) and I love it. One thing though, is there any chance of seeing goto-symbol like functionality in LightTable (thinking about goto-symbol in Sublime 3, super useful!)
dustingetz 13y ago
Hi Chris, Instarepl is an awesome idea. If someone were to implement an insta-repl as an IntelliJ plugin, or an emacs plugin, what remaining advantages would LT have? Is there something about the architecture of existing IDEs that is incompatible with an insta-repl? Say I'm writing a medium size webapp, like, say, Gmail, in clojure + clojurescript. I don't understand how integrating my app into LT is going to 10x my productivity, outside of instarepl. Or being able to on-the-fly extend my IDE. Emacs can do that, and its not exactly a feature i can't live without. It just seems like all the things you're talking about on the list, like [commands, settings, threading models, plugins, UX] are previously solved problems.
- danneu 13y ago
  LightTable's trajectory is a bit different than what you're going to get with a monolthic IDE and the Clojure plugin that does its best to wrestle with the IDE. I also don't think LightTable's core offering is a huge boost in raw productivity unless your workflow right now is notepad.exe and manual repl reloads. - Just to point out two features from the post: "watchers" (live runtime feedback) and one big extensible datastructure.
tl 13y ago
Offtopic: Why does google groups require you to login to view images?
- ivanca 13y ago
  It doesn't, check again in other browser or something.
ajanuary 13y ago
Very anal, but it seems like the title should be rendered as "Light Table", not "LightTable".

173 points by swah 13y ago

Here's a video of the coolest new feature, "watches": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8-b6QEN-rk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8-b6QEN-rk I'm also really excited about the behaviors stuff. It means that the entirety of LT's functionality is described in a datastructure that you could reasonably modify by hand. Here's a gist of default.behaviors: https://gist.github.com/ibdknox/6010853 https://gist.github.com/ibdknox/6010853 The :+ is there because it's stored as a diff, which allows other behaviors files to add and remove functionality based on the order they're loaded.

nickik 13y ago
Nice you are probebly reading this, I'll ask here. I have started to use LT for some clojure/clojure script development and real like it. As much as you can like something that new, but I really belive it will replace everything, not just for development but also for 'normal' stuff. There is one simple change that I would really like to see. In the Instarepl and the normal result that are shown 'in line', the result is just printed and not pretty printed, witch makes it almost useless in case of a complex datastructure. Is there any reason for that? Can I change that? Im developing something that looks like a boardgame, and seeing the result of a function with a board in it is almost useless, I still have to pprint it to see whats going on.
- ibdknox 13y ago
  It's something I was going to work on for 0.5. I do a fair number of things to make lazy seqs not blow everything up and pprinting will force lazy seqs to be realized causing all sorts of nastiness. There may be some decent middle ground in there somewhere though.
  - nickik 13y ago
    Ah, I see how this could be a problem. Maybe show it the like now, and then if you click on it one could pprint it. Does print-length work with pprint?
  - aviflax 13y ago
    Fipp might be relevant: https://github.com/brandonbloom/fipp https://github.com/brandonbloom/fipp
    - ibdknox 13y ago
      Fipp is awesome and I'd love to use it, but there doesn't appear to be a clojurescript implementation of finger trees and last I knew he hadn't solved the print-length/depth problem either.
      - brandonbloom 13y ago
        I'll solve the print-length/depth problem, if you write the ClojureScript port of finger trees!
drcode 13y ago
I really love the philosophy of LightTable and will make a serious attempt with 0.5 to make it part of my standard dev workflow, but I keep wishing it had a single-stepping debugger built in, especially for clojure code. Am I doing something wrong that I keep depending on such an old-timey feature? Again, thanks for the great work and sorry for talking about even more functionality (the existing LightTable is just so cool that I'd love to have it be even more awesome by including my favorite features :-)
- ibdknox 13y ago
  I'm not sure I'll do it, but that's my answer for almost everything at this point. Ultimately this is why I'm taking the strategy I am - plugins will be able to do anything I can do quickly and efficiently. Integrating a step-wise debugger won't be a completely trivial amount of work, but I'd be surprised if it took more than a few days and it's something anyone should be able to do :) After 0.5, my goal is to remove us as a bottleneck as quickly as possible and then who knows what'll happen :D
  - moneyrich 13y ago
    how do you even get .4 into table mode? how much has your priorities changed from things like, being a always having the docs available and new editor features like table mode, now that you have to deal with all these customers? what are your thoughts on doing software projects on kickstarter after doing one?
goldfeld 13y ago
Will JavaScript be able to script plugins or will it be limited to Clojure?
- ibdknox 13y ago
  Initially it will likely be easier to write plugins in ClojureScript, but there's nothing preventing JS ones from being written. Before the plugin stuff goes completely public, I'll probably write a little JS shim layer that makes it a bit more natural.
gcr 13y ago
> It means that the entirety of LT's functionality is described in a datastructure that you could reasonably modify by hand. I'm confused. Emacs embraced this principle almost forty years ago. Would you mind explaining to me what's novel about LightTable's take on this old idea? Is it "That, But Clojure!"? or "That, But With More Webkit!"? Each of these could be valuable in their own right... Or am I missing something more fundamental?
- goldfeld 13y ago
  How about, "Turtles all the way down just like Emacs?" I think you don't really have to come up with something revolutionary on top of the Emacs philosophy for it to be a very worthwhile pursuit. The things you mention plus the fact that it's as easy to get started as Sublime (or aims to) makes it a fantastic entry point for lots of new people into a tried, true and powerful way of working. Sadly, it's not open source.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >I'm confused. Emacs embraced this principle almost forty years ago. Would you mind explaining to me what's novel about LightTable's take on this old idea? That it's based on technologies, design sensibilities and UI ideas that weren't around "almost forty years ago".

vosper 13y ago

Great to see things are coming along with LightTable. I was a bit surprised by this: > Lots of things that were blocking the UI no longer are thanks to some magical hackery (given the lack of threads in JS) I thought WebWorkers where designed to alleviate these kinds of issues. It seems like Webkit supports WebWorkers so I'm surprised they weren't used - anyone know the rationale?

ibdknox 13y ago
I can't do any kind of IO in a webworker, which means things like indexing the filesystem are impossible there. The vast majority of cases where I need to do background work I also need access to the host. EDIT: I should note that I did start with webworkers for things like auto-complete, but what I'm doing now (spinning up another instance of node) is a lot more powerful and robust. As scary and sad as that may be.
- airlocksoftware 13y ago
  Kinda tangential, but mentioning threads brought it up. I have core.async on the brain, so I was just wondering if you've looked at it or plan on using it for anything. David Nolen had a cool example using it for event handling.
  - ibdknox 13y ago
    There are places where it'd be useful, no doubt about that. Mainly it will be really useful in the cases where you want to ask a client something "synchronously". For example it'll make doing things like asking a language client where function boundaries are much nicer than the way I was going to have to do it before (waiting for events to be triggered async-style).
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Why to use node instead of Clojure then? This seems just like hacking around a non-existing problem if JS wasn't being used.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

_halgari 13y ago

can we please get paredit? I would probably use it if it had that feature, but until it does, it's basically useless for my day-to-day work.

olenhad 13y ago
+1. Clojure without paredit is painful. Its the only reason why I'm unable to use LT for more than a toy.
- emidln 13y ago
  I actually disabled paredit when I was using vim and have done so again while using emacs+evil. The way I write code i typically simply do opening parens and at the end just jam parens until the rainbow-delimiters start to show up unbalanced (red in my case). If I need to pay attention because I'm not at the end of a top level form, I quickly glance to see which matched parens are flashing as I add each delimiter.
  - wnesensohn 13y ago
    Honest advice: The power of paredit lies not in managing the closing parens. I found that the benefits of paredit show only when you use barf/slurp/split/join. Keep the paredit cheat-sheet around (http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PareditCheatsheet http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PareditCheatsheet) for quick reference, and if you're anything like me and don't like the emacs-meta-ctrl-style key-combos, customize the keys, I've found the defaults to be quite lacking for vim/evil users. Using paredit only for parens-matching feels to me like using only hjkl in vim. While you can use vim this way, you won't fully reap the benefits until you start to use the other movement commands.
    - aerique 13y ago
      Could you do a little write-up on your paredit workflow. Like the post you replied to I've found it mostly annoying to use in normal Emacs and nowadays with evil-mode.

danneu 13y ago

It's easy to spark interest in other developers by converting their Ruby/Python code to Clojure. But LightTable has made it possible for me to recommend an editor that has integrated repl feedback and lets them hit the ground running with Clojure when they ask me how they should get started. Since Lisps are so tool/workflow-dependent, it's just way too easy for a newcomer to dismiss it all after a bad experience because they simply didn't know about electric parens or they never discovered the tight repl feedback loop that makes us so productive. And it makes it frustrating for those of us as well that are trying to convince others to give Lisps a shot since we can't stand over their shoulders. Sometime I'd like to make a well-planned gif (like that on the homepage of http://www.sublimetext.com/ http://www.sublimetext.com/) that gives newcomers a glimpse of a solid workflow to strive for.

swah 13y ago
I like that gif too :) One of the few blog posts from jps (st devel) that isn't just a changelog: http://www.sublimetext.com/~jps/animated_gifs_the_hard_way.html http://www.sublimetext.com/~jps/animated_gifs_the_hard_way.h...

frio 13y ago

I use LT productively at the moment and really enjoy it, so thanks ibdknox! I did see on one of the mailing lists that you had spiked up an integration with JSHint, and that might make it into LT 0.5. Is that still the case, or have you deferred that for implementing the plugin framework? I ask because I'd like to push it at work, but many of our developers rely on JSHint/SublimeLinter, and it's much nicer having that integrated into our editors.

ibdknox 13y ago
Should be in there. :)

srin 13y ago

This looks great! I'm really trying to use it more, though last time it did feel heavier than sublime. I'm glad that was addressed. Can anyone point me to a good tutorial/example regarding clojure and clojurescript projects in lighttable for windows and mac?

Skinney 13y ago

First of all, I use LightTable for all Clojure development at work (we use it for our tools) and I love it. One thing though, is there any chance of seeing goto-symbol like functionality in LightTable (thinking about goto-symbol in Sublime 3, super useful!)

dustingetz 13y ago

Hi Chris, Instarepl is an awesome idea. If someone were to implement an insta-repl as an IntelliJ plugin, or an emacs plugin, what remaining advantages would LT have? Is there something about the architecture of existing IDEs that is incompatible with an insta-repl? Say I'm writing a medium size webapp, like, say, Gmail, in clojure + clojurescript. I don't understand how integrating my app into LT is going to 10x my productivity, outside of instarepl. Or being able to on-the-fly extend my IDE. Emacs can do that, and its not exactly a feature i can't live without. It just seems like all the things you're talking about on the list, like [commands, settings, threading models, plugins, UX] are previously solved problems.

danneu 13y ago
LightTable's trajectory is a bit different than what you're going to get with a monolthic IDE and the Clojure plugin that does its best to wrestle with the IDE. I also don't think LightTable's core offering is a huge boost in raw productivity unless your workflow right now is notepad.exe and manual repl reloads. - Just to point out two features from the post: "watchers" (live runtime feedback) and one big extensible datastructure.

tl 13y ago

Offtopic: Why does google groups require you to login to view images?

ivanca 13y ago
It doesn't, check again in other browser or something.

ajanuary 13y ago

Very anal, but it seems like the title should be rendered as "Light Table", not "LightTable".