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Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

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21–30 of 37 posts

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#21
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, what do you want me to fix then?

It requires a lot of effort to get information. The embedded auto-playing video reminds me of pre-Facebook social networking, requiring further effort turning it off (especially after scrolling down trying to figure out what's what) before a user can then move their cursor around the site to access the content they wants.

Thank you, I modified it a bit so that this shouldn't be an issue now.

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That website is awful.

Alright, what do you want me to fix then?

Not the op, but some considerations:

The screenshot isn't readable, feels odd tacked on at the bottom, and if you click it, you don't get an enlarged version. This is a language, not an editor, right? That's what the title says. But where is the hello world? Where is the list of snippets to give you a feel for the language?

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#23
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As if money would magically make hard things happen :) If those hard things require people working full-time on solving them, then yes, money does magically makes them happen. > Seriously, what if Python is specially hard to support for some reason? This is engineering and computer science, there are no magical reasons, only specifics. What would make Python difficult to support exactly? It has full introspection,…

Well, I imagine one reason is that there are exactly zero static call sites in Python. Everything is called by name, and monkey-patching is, for better or worse, an accepted and widely used tactic. I have seen projects that use Python's source code introspection facility to rewrite code inside decorators. You can even define new keywords in this way. Decorators in general are a widely used tactic to execute arbitrari…

> monkey-patching is, for better or worse, an accepted and widely used tactic.

I'd dispute this.

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#24
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, what do you want me to fix then?

Not the op, but some considerations: The screenshot isn't readable, feels odd tacked on at the bottom, and if you click it, you don't get an enlarged version. This is a language, not an editor, right? That's what the title says. But where is the hello world? Where is the list of snippets to give you a feel for the language?

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll try to work on it. Both the language and the editor are currently in development (it's just an alpha version) but as a user you need to use the editor due to technical reasons (syntaxless). Of course you could write your own editor and just use bp as a standalone compiler but that would mean you need to develop an editor that can produce the generic XML output. I'm pretty sure nobody wants to do this so I'm working on a default IDE to make it more user-friendly.

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#25
post #6

I still can't believe people are paying this much attention to a glorified text editor.

As programmers, we spend most of our working time in glorified text editors (I'm using mostly Emacs at the moment, which that is certainly an apt description of). I guess it's natural to be excited about new alternatives for our primary tool.

Light table is a neat concept but there is a lot more to an efficient text editor than that one concept...

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#26
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As if money would magically make hard things happen :) If those hard things require people working full-time on solving them, then yes, money does magically makes them happen. > Seriously, what if Python is specially hard to support for some reason? This is engineering and computer science, there are no magical reasons, only specifics. What would make Python difficult to support exactly? It has full introspection,…

Well, I imagine one reason is that there are exactly zero static call sites in Python. Everything is called by name, and monkey-patching is, for better or worse, an accepted and widely used tactic. I have seen projects that use Python's source code introspection facility to rewrite code inside decorators. You can even define new keywords in this way. Decorators in general are a widely used tactic to execute arbitrari…

Monkey patching is NOT widely accepted in Python, just the opposite. For an example look at gevent, which is actually quite useful and elegant but often panned and avoided in the Python community because it works by monkey patching. The same attitude is not equally present in every dynamic language.

Where you are certainly right is that monkeypatching may occur in a project and this is only one of many ways that Python's being very dynamic makes it extra hard to write static analysis tools.

The rm -rf problem is not as bad if you are previewing (say) a page view, which hopefully is not being developed on a production server and hopefully doesn't contain an rm -rf. But I agree that solving this in the general case is probably intractable without some kind of container.

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#27

The bp editor has similar features (code bubbles), though dynamic evaluation and code bubble workspaces are still in development. And I'm pretty sure it won't cost me 300k to finish it. http://blitzprog.org/

That website is awful.

Well for what it's worth, I disagree.

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#28

The bp editor has similar features (code bubbles), though dynamic evaluation and code bubble workspaces are still in development. And I'm pretty sure it won't cost me 300k to finish it. http://blitzprog.org/

More feedback - I like the site's appearance just fine (I use low contrast colorschemes when programming so that's fine for me). But it's also pretty overwhelming with the sheer word volume on the first page. I don't yet understand why I would use it. I find that it's hard to interpret much of the promotional copy. Suppose I use (just to choose something) Ruby, what sort of projects or reasons should I switch for?

Editing on an AST is a neat idea. I think it is a neat idea for an editor. Coupling tightly to a particular editor is going to hurt the adoption of your language, just like coupling to a particular language hurts the adoption of your editor.

But it seems like you have some neat ideas and I hope you are not too discouraged by the negative feedback.

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What call graphs? Everything in python is call-by-name. `globals()['foo']` isn't exactly a very strong reference, and anyone can change it.

In practice, those things are hardly changed. When they are, users understand that the IDE might not be able to help them,

Yep, that kind of thing is pretty strongly discouraged anyway and as a Python programmer I definitely have never expected (say) lint tools to understand them. Life goes on, it's just not that important for getting things done.

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#30

The bp editor has similar features (code bubbles), though dynamic evaluation and code bubble workspaces are still in development. And I'm pretty sure it won't cost me 300k to finish it. http://blitzprog.org/

This is a neat concept and I liked it. The website is a bit confusing and I thought BP is a text editor like LightTable. The links are clickable and doesn't lead to anywhere added to the confusion. A few use cases will be helpful. Is it customizable and supports other languages?

I would love to see this evolve into something bigger. Keep up the good work!

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