Light Table - a new IDE concept

Great to see another clojure tool heading away from the old traditional and largely text based environments to something new and better. Anyhow, looks a lot like Code-Bubbles to me (http://www.andrewbragdon.com/codebubbles_site.asp). As he was talking about how other engineers work, on big tables where they place and organize all their current notes, items, documents - in the future, I'd like to have a large epaper covered, touch and object sensitive desk and couple of light epaper devices to take down and organize notes and code. Software will become more complicated in the future, so I think at some day we will need to adapt and use more powerful tools than the ones we currently have.

That's awesome - I usually have a few different windows, either in emacs or just other terminals open to look at different functions at once.

Good work!

I was thinking the same thing. Many of those ideas would be great emacs modes. In fact during the first minute of the video I was going to ask how he skinned emacs to be so pretty :)

This is awesome. I love the idea and the implementation looks great. ibdknox claims that it would work with any dynamic language. I'm not sure there is anything capable of finding dependent functions in Python without actually executing the code.

Could someone illuminate me?

    - Smallest unit of code is the function.
    - Able to get instant feedback on code changes.
    - Multiple editors with just one function in it. Show code
      in an "area of concern" not just in a file.
    - The coding environment can show also results, app 
      windows, graphics, other tools.
    - Can save the configuration of the above.

Smalltalkers have been doing this in commercial projects since the 80's. If only we could have communicated about this as well as Mr. Granger.

EDIT - Also:

    - You should never have to look for documentation
    - Files are not the best representation of code, 
      just a convenient serialization.
    - Editors can be anywhere and show you anything - not just text.
    - Trying is encouraged - changes produce instaneous results
    - We can shine some light on related bits of code

Things like this were happening in Smalltalk environments since the 80's. The first and the last points above were satisfied by lightning fast "senders" and "implementers" searches.