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Light Table is in YCS12

chris-granger.com

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Re: Light Table is in YCS12

#71

Post by batista »

Cushman wrote: post #11

While being a part of YC doesn't affect our plans or change our use of Kickstarter as a means of accelerating the release of Light Table, many pledged with the explicit purpose of making sure that it had a chance. With YC that chance is now safe and we wanted to let our supporters know there will be no hard feelings if this changes your desire to pledge. Light Table uses Kickstarter to demonstrate market demand, YC r…

>There are a lot of ways to read the situation, but my favorite is that Light Table makes sense purely as a strategic acquisition for YC; there are enough YC companies using the languages Light Table targets that, should it yield magical productivity gains, the knock-on effects from being able to get their developers early access and input would be enormous. If they wind up changing the future of software development, all the better.*

This sounds like a really lame conspiracy theory. YC got LT to "yield magical productivity gains" to it's companies? Please. Even if the programmers dropped their editors (Emacs, etc) to adopt LT, the productivity gains would be marginal. And code productivity at that level is not the bottleneck for a startup success either.

A decent product people want to use, connections, and chance are far more important. For all the "we used Lisp so we did it faster/better" bragging, Yahoo could almost just as easily buy any other ViaWeb competitor for example, even one using the lamest of methodologies.

Downvotes? People believe that using a better editor/IDE will yield "magical productivity gains" for a company?

Or that ViaWeb succeeded because it was in Lisp? Well, how about the other 99% of companies, that succeeded based on lame technologies, from Facebook's PHP, to whatever. One company doing something successfully among thousands is as far from a proof as you can get. Post-fact rationalization sounds more like it ("Oh, we got bought. It was because we were ultra-productive programmers yielding Lisp").

Re: Light Table is in YCS12

#72

Post by mey »

scarredwaits wrote: post #12
ibdknox wrote: post #3

We normally would wait to announce this until it was time to drum up the press machine, but it was more important to us that you guys know what's going on. If anyone has specific questions/concerns, I'll be lurking.

I initially donated to make sure light table becomes a reality, but I will not withdraw my donation because I think this is a very worthwhile project and I still feel proud to support it. In other words: SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!!!

I was planning to contribute towards the end of the campaign, but now that the kickstarter is successful AND YC is taking it under it's wings, I'm going to wait to be a retail customer.

Wish you the best of luck, this project is very interesting.

Re: Light Table is in YCS12

#73

Post by gavanwoolery »

Jun8 wrote: post #66

I have a comment that I thought about since I read this in the morning but could be perhaps interpreted as negative, but I'm really curious as to what people are thinking about this: I think this news is great , the quicker innovative editing tools like LT appear the better. But I have an uneasy feeling about an incubator (even though YC is the best one, IMO) or a VC scooping up projects from Kickstarter. I always th…

I think it depends on the project. With any sufficient amount of talent behind something this ambitious, the $200k they raised on Kickstarter will go quite fast...on one hand, they should take the VC money while they are "hot" - but on the other, if they could ride out their funds they would probably have more leverage with a stable-ish product in place.

Re: Light Table is in YCS12

#74

Post by smalter »

Jun8 wrote: post #66

I have a comment that I thought about since I read this in the morning but could be perhaps interpreted as negative, but I'm really curious as to what people are thinking about this: I think this news is great , the quicker innovative editing tools like LT appear the better. But I have an uneasy feeling about an incubator (even though YC is the best one, IMO) or a VC scooping up projects from Kickstarter. I always th…

This is happening. I personally know of 3 Kickstarter -> VC-backed startups, and I'm sure it's more widespread than that.

Kickstarter serves projects that are on a continuum from "pure" art (uncommercializable) to pre-sales (already commercial), so a transition to a full-fledged commercial endeavor makes a lot of sense for many many projects.

There will still be a lot of amazing Olympic amateur projects, I hope/expect!

Re: Light Table is in YCS12

#75

Post by philip1209 »

Jun8 wrote: post #66

I have a comment that I thought about since I read this in the morning but could be perhaps interpreted as negative, but I'm really curious as to what people are thinking about this: I think this news is great , the quicker innovative editing tools like LT appear the better. But I have an uneasy feeling about an incubator (even though YC is the best one, IMO) or a VC scooping up projects from Kickstarter. I always th…

Honestly, YCombinator provides near-zero money. It's a strategic investment because they gain networking, a position in the valley, and access to the best programmers. It will make deployment easier. Now, if they need a lawyer, an accountant, a new staff member, or anything else - the YCombinator backing will make everything smoother so that they can focus on the core product.

Re: Light Table is in YCS12

#76

Post by ShardPhoenix »

batista wrote: post #71
Cushman wrote: post #11

While being a part of YC doesn't affect our plans or change our use of Kickstarter as a means of accelerating the release of Light Table, many pledged with the explicit purpose of making sure that it had a chance. With YC that chance is now safe and we wanted to let our supporters know there will be no hard feelings if this changes your desire to pledge. Light Table uses Kickstarter to demonstrate market demand, YC r…

>There are a lot of ways to read the situation, but my favorite is that Light Table makes sense purely as a strategic acquisition for YC; there are enough YC companies using the languages Light Table targets that, should it yield magical productivity gains, the knock-on effects from being able to get their developers early access and input would be enormous. If they wind up changing the future of software development…

While I sort-of agree with your point, I think you're being unnecessarily hostile here.

Re: Light Table is in YCS12

#77

Post by vibrunazo »

nextparadigms wrote: post #44

I haven't followed the discussions much before, but will this support Android development sometime in the future?

Why exactly would you want support for Android development? As far as I understand, LightTable's target are languages which doesn't already have the tools they're offering (dynamic scripting languages like JS, python etc). The existing Android dev tools already have all the features that LightTable is bringing to them. We already have those in Eclipse, we don't need LightTable. Only the dynamic languages with poor tooling does.

(If you're an Android developer who misses some of the features of LightTable, you should look for some tutorials at www.eclipse.org, you'll learn eclipse can already do those and much more)

Re: Light Table is in YCS12

#78

Post by 1234the1234 »

jaredsohn wrote: post #65
Jun8 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be talking about the alpha release that was released end of last year? My joke about TM's new release turned out to be not so good.

I'm pretty sure that the GP just made a joke that at least didn't work for you. The GP is likely referring to this sentiment: "I started to realize that Sublime Text seemed to be everything many of us had hoped for in Textmate 2, but in software that was available today in a polished, fully functional version, not a just a rather buggy alpha preview." -- http://casperfabricius.com/site/2012/01/24/my-first-week-wit...

If only all these attempts at vim clones were instead spent on vim.

Re: Light Table is in YCS12

#79

Post by opminion »

ibdknox wrote: post #36
spamizbad wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for one, you can't make small modifications to the code and then resell it as a commercial product with the original author's copyrights tucked away in an about box. You'd actually have to release the source code too. It will be harder to convince customers you've added value if they can see exactly what you've changed.

We have some ideas on how we'll facilitate that. There will definitely be ways for people to sell plugins they create and or for large companies to keep them closed source.

Grandparent was being sarcastic:

It will be harder to convince customers you've added value if they can see exactly what you've changed.

Re: Light Table is in YCS12

#80

Post by azernik »

Jun8 wrote: post #66

I have a comment that I thought about since I read this in the morning but could be perhaps interpreted as negative, but I'm really curious as to what people are thinking about this: I think this news is great , the quicker innovative editing tools like LT appear the better. But I have an uneasy feeling about an incubator (even though YC is the best one, IMO) or a VC scooping up projects from Kickstarter. I always th…

I've actually seen quite a few Kickstarter projects where VCs have used the Kickstarter as a gauge of consumer interest. In this, it still serves the same function I would like it to serve - it lets creators bypass the VC/publisher barrier of "we haven't seen something like this work, so we're not funding it", by showing in advance that there is market demand.
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