Eclipse as a good ide ? mpprfrffrt
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
That's the blog of a company that makes a tool that integrates with Eclipse.
LightTable detailed critique: Concept vs Reality
31–40 of 136 posts
Re: LightTable detailed critique: Concept vs Reality
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
one reason is probably that he is the developer of a "DVR for Java" that "Record entire execution of your Java app" and allows you to "Play it back on any machine". That and the clear lack of experience with anything different than Java is clearly heavily influencing his perspective. And I think there is no malice, it's just biased without realising it
I smell 'ad hominem'
not really, just that all of us come with a point of view and I think his is made clear by the work he is doing on that project.
Never used it, looks interesting and useful for Java. That's where I think the problem is: if you have used only one tool you tend to see everything from that perspective.
Re: LightTable detailed critique: Concept vs Reality
#33Is the demo a bit contrived? Sure, but it's an inspired vision that was whipped up inside of a week. I don't think the creator has any illusions that making the vision a reality will be easy. However, it is clear that this vision is inspiring to a lot of developers and has some traction.
Re: LightTable detailed critique: Concept vs Reality
#34I find this 'critique' (it's not a critique, it's a takedown) to run against the spirit of Hacker News. Someone built a concept showing how the experience of writing code, for their corner of the software ecosystem, could be improved. They found popular support, and they're now setting about to make that concept happen. Congratulations; this is what Hacker News is supposed to be all about. And here's someone summaril…
I don't even see it as a critique, it's more of a "I use Eclipse and I like Eclipse because it is tailored to my needs as a Java developer" article.
Re: LightTable detailed critique: Concept vs Reality
#35I find this 'critique' (it's not a critique, it's a takedown) to run against the spirit of Hacker News. Someone built a concept showing how the experience of writing code, for their corner of the software ecosystem, could be improved. They found popular support, and they're now setting about to make that concept happen. Congratulations; this is what Hacker News is supposed to be all about. And here's someone summaril…
yes! So this. I agree; Let's see some constructive criticism and ideas for how to improve the LightTable idea, instead of just trying to shoot it down as 'not novel'.
Parenthetically, I get rather irritated with people who like to criticize everything as "not novel." Depending on how you look at it almost nothing is completely "novel" ("nothing new under the sun" and all that).
What is important is the execution and new wrinkles in the CURRENT iteration - NOT whether something vaguely or even pretty similar was attempted or proposed at some point in the past.
Re: LightTable detailed critique: Concept vs Reality
#36I find this 'critique' (it's not a critique, it's a takedown) to run against the spirit of Hacker News. Someone built a concept showing how the experience of writing code, for their corner of the software ecosystem, could be improved. They found popular support, and they're now setting about to make that concept happen. Congratulations; this is what Hacker News is supposed to be all about. And here's someone summaril…
yes! So this. I agree; Let's see some constructive criticism and ideas for how to improve the LightTable idea, instead of just trying to shoot it down as 'not novel'.
There is a valid point lurking in there.
The instant evaluation model doesn't play nicely with side-effects. Exactly where side-effects occur can be difficult to determine, there's no simple way to work around this.
This is less of a problem in Clojure, thanks to its immutable data structures, but they're not a panacea. I'm also not sure how well this would work in JS and Python, the other languages that Light Table intends to initially target.
One possible solution is to have hooks into side-effects: you could display console output or logging alongside the instant evaluation. The real difficulty is network communication: even if you're okay with actually sending requests over the wire, there's an awkward balance between visibility and generality. Something like libpcap [1] is very general, but gives minimal insight into the content. Hooking into a particular HTTP client library gives you a lot more visibility into what's going on, but you'll need to do this every time you want to use a new library.
Re: LightTable detailed critique: Concept vs Reality
#37You're comparing Java to Clojure. Conceptually, they're insanely different--Apple and Oranges, really. Clojure, Lisp, and similar languages are homoiconic. That means they're beautifully suited to an interactive environment such as that provided by LightTable. Conceptually, unlike typical IDEs, LightTable is not a series of scripts that will attempt to help you deal with common development tasks such as looking up do…
Java's annotations could be seen as 'part of the environment' (whatever that may mean). I often use annotations which indicate how a method should be used, and those annotations are used by static analysis to validate correctness. When using Java, I often change my program while it is running. recompiling classes on the fly. It works in most cases, and when it doesn't work, I believe other languages would fail as wel…
I use Java in my day job and I find annotations a real blight on the language. While I totally get the idea that they remove the need to write a lot of boilerplate code, I still find a lot of them too "voodoo" for my liking.
Re: LightTable detailed critique: Concept vs Reality
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I smell 'ad hominem'
not really, just that all of us come with a point of view and I think his is made clear by the work he is doing on that project. Never used it, looks interesting and useful for Java . That's where I think the problem is: if you have used only one tool you tend to see everything from that perspective.
His argument is on how most concepts in light table are not novel. Branding light table as novel or groundbreaking is therefor incorrect and his post is called for.
You seem to attack his argument on his background as a Java developer and not on parts of his argument. As far as I know, this is called an ad hominem attack and in my opinion does not belong on Hacker News.
If you can find good counter arguments on his arguments:
- Light Table is not novel or groundbreaking since Eclipse has had these kind of features for at least a decade (and several Smalltalk IDE's have had them for several decades), - Light Table's examples are contrived because real world examples do not behave in this way,
we'd be having a real discussion.
Re: LightTable detailed critique: Concept vs Reality
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
not really, just that all of us come with a point of view and I think his is made clear by the work he is doing on that project. Never used it, looks interesting and useful for Java . That's where I think the problem is: if you have used only one tool you tend to see everything from that perspective.
His argument is on how most concepts in light table are not novel. Branding light table as novel or groundbreaking is therefor incorrect and his post is called for. You seem to attack his argument on his background as a Java developer and not on parts of his argument. As far as I know, this is called an ad hominem attack and in my opinion does not belong on Hacker News. If you can find good counter arguments on his a…
first: I replied to zacharyvoase's comment and therefore my comment was related to his, don't take it in isolation.
There are plenty of other comments here that explain why pdeva1 is coming from the wrong angle therefore I'm not going to repeat them.
Chris never mentioned novel or groundbreaking, others have so go and ask them but please before you do that look up the difference between invention and innovation and also remember that novel really means fresh or refreshing (although it's used most of the time to indicate new)
Re: LightTable detailed critique: Concept vs Reality
#40Also even if the code were indeed based on just basic numerical or string primitives, how would the 'instant feedback' work if the code were in a long, tight loop or did heavy cpu intensive stuff?
I think this is a critical point, has the author of LightTable considered what would happen with instant feedback for less trivial pieces of code?
Besides that, I think this critique is fair, because honestly when I saw LightTable, it seemed like smoke and mirrors. I have a friend quietly writing an innovative new text editor, I expect it will be more 'ground-breaking' than LightTable, but I don't see him trying to take everybody's money.