Light Table - a new IDE concept • Hacker News Board

Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept

#241

Post by timmy-turner » Sat, Apr 14, 2012, 7:04 AM UTC

marbletiles wrote: post #64

Am I the only one who wants to see multiple, proportional fonts in editors? Sure, I want to keep the methods themselves in monospaced font, but can't I have the method declaration in a larger size, and comments in a proportional serif? There is a wealth of design experience out there in communicating things better and more quickly with typography, so why do we not take advantage of that in our IDEs?

No you're not the only one. I've been working on pretty printers for SQL and Clojure, to render their textual representation using html elements other than

 so that they keep their indentation, regardless of font style or size (example: http://pastehtml.com/view/bun1zr4o7.html).

Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept

#242

Post by timmy-turner » Sat, Apr 14, 2012, 7:04 AM UTC

marbletiles wrote: post #64

Am I the only one who wants to see multiple, proportional fonts in editors? Sure, I want to keep the methods themselves in monospaced font, but can't I have the method declaration in a larger size, and comments in a proportional serif? There is a wealth of design experience out there in communicating things better and more quickly with typography, so why do we not take advantage of that in our IDEs?

No you're not the only one. I've been working on pretty printers for SQL and Clojure, to render their textual representation using html elements other than

 so that they keep their indentation, regardless of font style or size (example: http://pastehtml.com/view/bun1zr4o7.html).

Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept

#243

Post by Randgalt » Sat, Apr 14, 2012, 7:20 AM UTC

OlegYch wrote: post #195

all of this (except the wonderful idea for debugging) is available in intellij you should also take a look at their scala repl, which just rocks

Yep - have the Lighttable folks ever used IntelliJ IDEA?

Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept

#244

Post by mleonhard » Sat, Apr 14, 2012, 7:27 AM UTC

"There's an incredible opportunity to change the way we build, and as a result introduce tremendous value into the world."

There should be a name for this desire to create to contribute to society.

Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept

#245

Post by 6ren » Sat, Apr 14, 2012, 7:33 AM UTC

jules wrote: post #40

This is great, however it glosses over the elephant in the room: what if a function is called multiple times, or what happens when code within a function is run multiple times? Which data do you display in the data flow view? What is really needed is an intuitive way to select a context or multiple contexts. SubText's approach to this is to let you dig deeper in the call tree by clicking on function calls, but for a…

And recursion. Light table's display is like a stacktrace, but each line expanded to the whole function. These scaling problems can be solved: exclude some functions, esp libraries (e.g. "native" functions like map aren't expanded). And standard scaling tricks e.g. one line, click to expand (like his doc navigator).

By "context", you mean you nominate a deeper function to display, but then how do you know which call to it is displayed? I think the answer is to display the rest of it, but collapsed/summarized. hmmm, the call trace is a tree in general, so that's getting a little hairier to manage. (NOTE: a tree, assuming you display a fresh instance of a function for each invocation, which you need to do to show the correct variable values)

Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept

#246

Post by DeveloperFish » Sat, Apr 14, 2012, 7:58 AM UTC

Interesting... @Taligent we built a completely object-oriented dev. environment for C++ (borrowing a lot from various SmallTalk environments). There was no file system - everything was an object - comments were stored in the object system along with implementations. This allowed for some really cool self-documented versioning on classes. However the real magic was in the debugger where we were building runtime support for "edit/run" and "what if" so you can edit faulty code and rerun w/out the recompile (essentially patching the class as it was running). Seems easy now (w/dynamic languages) but at the time this was close to "rocket science..."

Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept

#247

Post by ecubed » Sat, Apr 14, 2012, 8:12 AM UTC

bjcy wrote: post #228

robomartin wrote: post #124

For years I've been bothered by the fact that we still use ASCII text-based documents to program. Having spent a good deal of time programing in APL, a language that uses symbols extensively, I'd like to think that I saw just how different things could be. Having said that, every time I've looked into graphical programming paradigms they almost always seem to fall apart or get in the way of translating ideas and thou…

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on LabVIEW, if you've ever used it: http://www.ni.com/labview/ . It's a graphical programming language with an emphasis on system design (for scientists and engineers) that uses a dataflow paradigm (amongst other things) and has a unique UI creation system. (Disclaimer: I work for National Instruments and my comments here in no way reflect the views of National Instruments and…

The whole time I was using LabVIEW (for a class) I kept dreaming of the days when I'd be done with it and back to a typed language.

Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept

#248

Post by jmgimeno » Sat, Apr 14, 2012, 8:29 AM UTC

I agree that sometimes files are not the best representation for code but languages gives them semantics. For instance, namespacing/packaging is based on files (which make dependencies based on files too).

Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept

#249

Post by shykes » Sat, Apr 14, 2012, 8:41 AM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #52

stcredzero wrote: post #29

- 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 commun…

Of course this comment was inevitable. If Smalltalkers really believe their environment is the right way to code, their attitude should not be one of "we did this first, meh" but instead be "here's what we did right, here's what we did wrong. heed the lessons of history and good luck, you are on a mission from God." I think with the proper care and nurturing, we could be at the beginning of a renaissance where many o…

It seems that Dan Ingalls, the father of Smalltalk, has picked up the baton again, this time using Javascript. Check out Lively Kernel (http://lively-kernel.org/). I saw a live demo at JSConf, it was pretty jaw-dropping stuff, completely in line with the Smalltalk legacy.

Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept

#250

Post by nikcub » Sat, Apr 14, 2012, 8:50 AM UTC

gruseom wrote: post #172

nikcub wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel + VBA solves a lot of that. The spreadsheet part just becomes a view. Somebody should really build a web app version of that, there are millions of custom Excel+VBA spreadsheets spread throughout businesses across the world. The only way they will migrate online is either through custom web apps (I used to do a lot of those) or with a generic solution which doesn't exist yet.

To migrate them online, do you think what's needed is a single-click "just upload your Excel spreadsheet and it will all work, including the VBA"? That is, how important is 100% compatibility, including VBA? (The technical bar for that is pretty high.)

I don't think it has to be compatible, just something that is as capable. I have been thinking about it for a while, I would use Lua or Javascript as the scripting language.

I don't know why Google hasn't done this yet.