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."

Comments

funding

[vlm]

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.

Re:Files are not the best representation of code..

[godefroi]

You mean, like Code Canvas?

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

Re:What's new?

[19thNervousBreakdown]

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.