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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
Here's the funding plan:
I'm happy to announce that we submitted our Kickstarter earlier today and are simply waiting for it to be reviewed.
In other news, to save everyone the time, I'll point out that 100 people are going to post the lighttable does what smalltalk did in the 80s. As with all IT and most CS stuff, there really is nothing new under the sun, just recycling. That doesn't mean its bad, or reimplementation of a good idea is bad, just that it isn't new.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
You mean, like Code Canvas?
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/codecanvas/
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This does seem sort of what LightTable seems to be aiming at, actually.
Yep, but without the eye bleeding UI ;)
Another benefit of moving away from explicitly managing files is that the computer is probably in a better position than the user to decide how to present the code to the compiler / linker. It could also have benefits in source control where you could track the history of an individual function better (imagine if someone refactors a function from one file into another).
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.
Yep. That's called SmallTalk.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
So, you want Smalltalk code browsers. This IDE concept is nothing new, Smalltalk had that kind of code browising from the start and the concept of a live image where every code change is done in a live vm. The only thing I see new here is some "modern" "HTMLy" UI
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 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.
You could do that today, in some programming environments, anyway. Some programming languages / compiler combinations allow classes to be split among files, into individual methods, if desired.
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Actually, certain debuggers have had "edit and continue", compile on the fly capability while debugging for C++ and Java since 2005 or so.
Watch this, his lectue and demo and then tell me it's the same as we already have, and that a man charged with designing new forms of human computer interaction at Apple didn't know this. Also please respond with why he wasted our time telling us something that already comonly exsisted in the software world, as well as how the confrence organisor and who ever aproved posting missed all this. https://vimeo.com/36579366 I was happy to see my post on slashdot. It's quite heavily edited, but this has improved the post. One question for slashdot, is the reason many posts get rejected due to posters needing heavy editing and this not having been done in the past.
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.
In C++, textual order matters.
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.
I've been using the frank gem with Ruby to see / explore effects of code changes in the browser.
The browser becomes a high-end output device (through frank's Auto-Refresh) for my text inputs.
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
I thought we'd all moved on to SATA by now.
so... "use the right maxim for the right job"?
Anybody want a peanut?
From the article:
Files are not the best representation of code, just a convenient serialization.
Trivially true: files aren't the "best" representation of code because the definition of "best" depends on context and goals (which shift constantly during a work session). That's a sort of non-claim. Absolutely true: files are a convenient serialization of code.
Some folks will look at the trivially true claim and think "Boo files! Let's do away with files altogether!". Then they will go off and develop something that throws away the absolutely true part of the claim [I'm looking at you Squeak, Centura SQL/Windows, Visual Basic, etc.].
Some will be smarter (or rather, more well-funded) and develop something that lets you have your cake [store data in text files] and eat it too [work w/alternate representations]. Despite all its drawbacks, XML has been a major enabler of this, and it has the advantage of playing nice with version control and other file management tools.
Some folks will be even smarter yet and figure out different ways to exploit the absolute truth: for instance, static HTML operates quite successfully on file based representation. That economy let it win the hypertext wars before they even began. Or as another example, the D programming language strengthens the meaning of the "file" as the logical unit of management (for instance, a private member is visible to all code within the same file, regardless of whether it's in a different class or not).
So I guess what I'm saying is... consider fad-ish claims carefully and try to place them in a more holistic perspective.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Why exactly do you want to see code as something other than what it is?
Abstraction layers lead to nothing but hassle...