Light Table IDE Finds Funding Success

omar.sahal writes "Chris Granger's Light Table IDE, covered here previously on Slashdot, has been successfully funded by a Kickstarter campaign. 7,317 backers brought in $316,720, obliging Chris to support the Python Programming language with his first release. Chris and his team have also been successful in being funded by Y Combinator. Here's some more background (video) on the concepts developed by Bret Victor found in Light Table.

Comments

A little late

[Mitreya]

Links to Kickstarter projects are much more interesting BEFORE the the funding round ends. It's too late for anyone to participate.
By the way, why can't I fund a closed (but funded) Kickstarter project past the deadline?

Re:A little late

[QuasiSteve]

Links to Kickstarter projects are much more interesting BEFORE the the funding round ends.

uhm.

Chris Granger's Light Table IDE, covered here previously on Slashdot

By the way, why can't I fund a closed (but funded) Kickstarter project past the deadline?

Sometimes you can - just not on KickStarter. KickStarter is an all-or-nothing + deadline type crowdfunding platform. There's actually very few that allow projects without a deadline - invested.in is biggest one that does that, off the top of my head.
However, sometimes projects set up alternative funding routes on their website.. paypal, credit card directly, etc. You can try and see if they offer that.

Re:A little late

[UCFFool]

By the way, why can't I fund a closed (but funded) Kickstarter project past the deadline?

As a successful Kickstarter project creator, I would hate that. It's one thing when you are doing software, but it's quite another when you are shipping a product. After it closes, you can go to the website and find out how you can get it once all Kickstarter backers are rewarded.

Re:A little late

[DogDude]

By the way, why can't I fund a closed (but funded) Kickstarter project past the deadline?

You can. Just send the company a check.

Re:A little late

[Anonymous Coward]

As a customer, if I can find out about something awesome you've done and I want to give you money for it how is that bad? As a business owner, how is it bad if people discover you through kickstarter and want to give you more money for something you've gotten off the ground?

Supply Chain.

If the project deadline arrives and you use the money to buy enough supplies to make a product for everyone +10% failures just to be safe. If another 100 people come along afterwards then you don't have the supplies to make and deliver the goods. If you got a bulk discount, ordering small boxes of supplies as people dribble in over a few weeks could destroy your profit margin.

In short: Kickstarter is not a shop. You don't place orders for goods, you donate in the hope of getting something back. If you want to give money after the project is completed, go to the creator's website and see if they have an online store, if they do, buy it from there, otherwise, tough shit.

sell off your extra inventory from canceled orders

You can't cancel a Kickstarter donation. Once the money is delivered, there are no refunds and there's a two week holding period before the creator gets the cash in case someone does a chargeback on their credit card (Two weeks is apparently the limit, Visa and Mastercard will tell you to fuck off if you try to cancel a charge after that). Once you're committed, you're committed, no take-backs.

Re:Yawn

[fmobus]

Did you even see their ideas? It's only similar to VI/emacs in that it's gonna have black background.

Re:Yawn

[durrr]

You obviously didn't see the presentation that Bret Victor guy churned out, I can spoil it by saying it was pretty damn awsome.

It's about fucking time that programming leaves the notepad + compiler stage.

Re:Yawn

[Hentes]

True, but all of those were developed for static languages in mind. Using them for dynamic languages is uncomfortable. This project might become for Python and Lisp what those environments are for C and Java.

Re:Yawn

[cheesybagel]

The guy was a VS Project Manager at MS. It's in his bio...

Light Table - Why it's Cool

[phantomfive]

It took me a long time to figure out what is interesting about Light Table. If you've seen Eclipse or Visual Studio, you might think that it's really boring, because both of those can do all that and more.

What's cool about it is this works in Python, which is a late-bound language. So far, no IDE will give you thinks like autocomplete for a language like Python or Ruby. This isn't a huge problem, but it's nice to have.

Re:Light Table - Why it's Cool

[tzot]

> So far, no IDE will give you thinks like autocomplete for a language like Python
Even "home-grown" IDLE has (semi)autocompletion.

Re:Light Table - Why it's Cool

[phantomfive]

How is this informative?

Apparently because no one else can figure out what is cool about light table either lol.

Showing results as you type is neither innovative, original, or often not even very useful, and neither is a method-based hierarchy. Everyone switched to thinking of them as class-based hierarchies a long time ago.

Re:Yawn

[mrvan]

Emacs and VI are good editors, and are great tools for working on a codebase and project that you are intimately familiar with.

Eclipse and especailly VS are fantastic IDEs, but AFAIK they kind of suck on dynamic languages, because (1) they don't use any of the great opportunities for supporting a programmer using dynamic executing, inspection etc, and esp (2) because all the features that make most IDEs great (links to documentation, click-through to implementation, autocomplete) are done using static code inspection, which sucks with a dynamic language because you have no clue what type an object is or could be.

If this can bring the power of a modern IDE to dynamic languages and actually uses the dynamic element of it do enhance coding, it will be a great new tool in the box.
 

Re:Yawn

[1s44c]

Vi is hard to learn and ugly but it's a really good editor. Ever wanted to change a few thousand lines in some complex way that find & replace just can't handle? It's the work of seconds. Vi is low bandwidth so can change those few thousand lines over a 300 baud link or a mobile data connection from some other country where graphical tools would kill you on data charges. Vi is also available on all UNIX systems.

I want to see you run VS over SSH on your mobile phone and manage to do anything productive with it.

I've no idea what emacs has going for it, I have never used it. Some people seem to love it.

Re:Yawn

[jbolden]

VS and XCode support statically typed languages. How to provide anything like those services to dynamically typed languages has been complex. There are some IDEs out there for dynamic but the development is definitely much stronger on the static side.

What am i missing here?

[nurb432]

From a quick glance at the sparse web page, it seems rather basic and nothing to get excited about..

So why should i care about this? ( no, not trolling, seriously. why should i want to jump ship from something like Eric or pyscripter? )

Re:Yawn

[Tenebrousedge]

Uh, huh. And this in this IDE you will be able to code fluently from second 0?

Why do you think people will be able to code fluently from second 0 in this IDE?

ELIZA program detected!

Re:Yawn

[DuckDodgers]

Did you watch the videos? Some of the ideas presented seem genuinely innovative - like the ability to move blocks of code from within a single file to different portions of the screen. That's flexibility related to what code you have on screen that's a few steps past multiple tabs, split screens, and folding editors.

And Light Table will be open source, though I think the creator is considering the creation of some proprietary add-ons.