Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

kickstarter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–37 of 37 posts

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#31

Post by nickik »

slurgfest wrote: post #25
archangel_one wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Psst, dont tell anybody, they are asking for money because they know a concept is not enougth and the need money to implment what you call 'a lot more'.

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#32

Post by slurgfest »

nickik wrote: post #31
slurgfest wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Psst, dont tell anybody, they are asking for money because they know a concept is not enougth and the need money to implment what you call 'a lot more'.

Good, so you understand that most of the problem is not this one concept. How does the one concept justify reinventing the wheel? There are several very good editors and IDEs. What is wrong with them?

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#33

Post by addisaden »

Would be great, when they got android support (for tablet). And with an Bluetooth keyboard you could rock also a lot. I don't know how complicated this is, because of the dalvikJvm engine.

But this IDE is amazing, really nice. Would be great to get also Rubysupport (with plugins you can Rock this also i think).

Does anybody know if they are working with flash, opengl or something like that? The look remembers me on Adobe Air and i hope this is not their engine.

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#34

Post by batista »

sirclueless wrote: post #12
batista wrote: 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…

>Well, I imagine one reason is that there are exactly zero static call sites in Python.

Are there in Smalltalk?

>There is just very little you can learn from parsing Python code, you need runtime state to understand some functions. It is potentially as difficult as Lisp, and with a much larger set of primitives to cover.

Yes, but Clojure, a "Lisp", is supported no? If in that case it's the JVM that provides extra runtime intelligence, they could make it support Jython instead of CPython.

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#35

Post by batista »

slurgfest wrote: post #32
nickik wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Psst, dont tell anybody, they are asking for money because they know a concept is not enougth and the need money to implment what you call 'a lot more'.

Good, so you understand that most of the problem is not this one concept. How does the one concept justify reinventing the wheel? There are several very good editors and IDEs. What is wrong with them?

They are just glorified text editors is what is wrong with them (to re-use your initial argument).

This concept/potential implementation has more syntactic intelligence.

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#36

Post by blitzprog »

slurgfest wrote: post #28
blitzprog wrote: post #14

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? Ed…

Appreciate it, sorry that I don't have the time at the moment to give you a detailed answer. Short answer would be: Performance, Scalability and Reusability but that sounds too abstract. Maybe I'll find the time to write an article about future plans.

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#37

Post by blitzprog »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #30
blitzprog wrote: post #14

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!

Thanks, it is really motivating to hear this. I'll definitely keep working on it and there are some planned features which I didn't even mention yet, I just need to find the time to develop them. Support for other languages is currently not the primary goal but it could be implemented later.
Post reply on HN