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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/
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Psst: You should try Emacs. Your productivity will skyrocket.
Just saying.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
so... "use the right maxim for the right job"?
Anybody want a peanut?
Why exactly do you want to see code as something other than what it is?
Abstraction layers lead to nothing but hassle...