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Light Table: A New Spin on the IDE
New submitter omar.sahal writes "Bret Victor demoed the idea of instant feedback on your code. ... Allowing the programmer to instantly see what his program is doing. Chris Granger has turned this novel idea into Light Table — a new IDE designed to make use of Victor's insights."
The screenshots make this look like it could be genuinely useful — like a much fancier and more functional combination of features from SLIME and Speedbar. There's a Google group for those wanting to track development. There's no code yet, but source is promised: "I can guarantee you that Light Table will be built on top of the technologies that are freely available to us today. As such, I believe it only fair that the core of Light Table be open sourced once it is launched, while some of the plugins may remained closed source."
...not some guys idea of IDE-NG
From the article:
Files are not the best representation of code, just a convenient serialization.
I've been thinking about this for a while and I think we do need a new generation of IDE which isn't based around showing source files in tabs, but rather code snippets (functions, class definitions etc.) on some kind of desktop. When I'm debugging code I don't want to jump through X files, I just want to see the X related functions so I can understand the programs flow etc.
Live debugging seems cool, however, basically every other feature is already implemented better in Visual Studio, Eclipse, or Netbeans. Hell, I have 95% of the functionality in Vim already. Why not just make the live debugging a plugin to one of the more mature editors? It seems you would get a whole lot more bang for your development time that way.
What exactly is bad about finally packing up all those new ideas? I'd rather not use 9 different IDEs for the 1 cool thing each does, and besides, once you get a bunch of things together, it's often more than the sum of its parts.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
The day my IDE is more rounded corners and empty space than actual code is the day I quit programming forever.
Luckily, my "IDE" is vim. Works great, about 50x more useful and faster than anything else I've tried and is available to me no matter where I am or what operating system I'm on at a given time.
No, that would be comparing it to Cobol.
To help people get the right comparison, here's a quick list:
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)