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Light Table: A New Spin on the IDE

Posted by Unknown on from the zmacs-did-it-before-you-were-born dept.

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."

4 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Files are not the best representation of code.. by godefroi · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You mean, like Code Canvas?

    http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/codecanvas/

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  2. Re:Interesting, but not new by OG · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The creator was a PM on Visual Studio. He's had quite a bit of experience as both an IDE user and developer, so I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that he's spent quite a bit of time thinking about usability.

  3. Wish I had some mod points. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    While I really like VS, there are some irksome points... namely that plugins are now fairly plentiful, but when it slows to a crawl, there's no way to tell which plugin is the culprit. Second is that half the times it crashes, it loses my settings.. I like VS on my left monitor with the nav panels on the left... code to the right, and my right monitor for running/previewing. It resets and that's annoying. That and the rare occasion I'm supporting a VB.Net project it crashes 5x as much.

    That said, I can have a new web project to the "hello world" stage much faster than say Eclipse for a similar project. This isn't meant for flamebait, just my own opinion. I wouldn't mind seeing some enhancements, and hope this is a successful effort. Personally I'd love to see continued advancement for JS development, specifically with NodeJS in mind.

  4. Re:Files are not the best representation of code.. by AdrianKemp · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why exactly do you want to see code as something other than what it is?

    Abstraction layers lead to nothing but hassle...