I like this concept. Once Light Table is becoming available I will definitely try to make a Flow-Based Programming mode for http://noflojs.org/
The future is specific
121–130 of 138 posts
Re: The future is specific
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say eclipse already does what light table aims to do. Can you come to a realization in the middle of an Eclipse debugging session, get a great idea for making yourself more productive, take time to script yourself a working and fully debugged extension of Eclipse and continue what you were doing 20 minutes later? I've done precisely this in Smalltalk on many occasions. You can script something like a custom b…
Acme supports constantly improving how you work in little ways, better than tools with plugins or extension languages, by not having many features, and providing a good interface to route text through shell pipelines. For a simple example, Acme has no paragraph justifier, but it doesn't need one, since fmt exists. To use it, highlight a paragraph of text with the left mouse button, highlight a typed-in |fmt command w…
You still need to use the mouse. One of the biggest benefits of Vi(m)/Emacs over everything else out there is that you don't need to use mouse for anything. For example, to justify a paragraph in Emacs I highlight it (several quick ways to do it with keyboard) and press C-u M-q. And you can do the general "replace text by running a shell command over it" by highlighting the text, and doing C-u M-| [shell-command-here].
The feature you're describing is awesome and useful, but I wouldn't be happy to have to use mouse for it. Is there a way to invoke it from keyboard in Acme?
Re: The future is specific
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Reading things like this, i sometimes worry that > the HN-circling web crowd is reinventing things > that others invented just a few years ago. The difference in this case is that the HN web crowd are targeting their fellow programmers, and not the "Enterprise" crowd. I've been following the DSL tooling scene, and it's horrible. Think closed source, expensive and targeted at the Enterprise (or specific engineering…
> The community is full of MDA (model-driven-architecture) types: too often is the focus on increasing complexity (for ego boosting / job security) instead of simplicity and accessibility. > .. instead of locking it up for fun and "profit". still, if you ignore the MDA and executable uml silliness, there's quite a few ideas that can be picked from that closed space, imo.
> still, if you ignore the MDA and executable uml silliness, there's quite a few ideas that can be picked from that closed space, imo.
Thats what Light Table does, isn't it? If not it will at least allow you to implement these ideas in a simple way.
Re: The future is specific
#124The key line for me here is that the future is in 'easily created domain specific experiences'. I think this is very eloquently stated and can't agree more. I like what Light table is trying to do, hoewver it is still working in pretty much the same 'domain' space as existing IDE's ('code'), and trying to improve on the 'easily created... experiences' part. As the post is waxing lyrical, my piece to add to the broad-…
I think a lot of that stuff can be done if there are JS implmentation. You want be able to use the importend functions from excel in a browser (or anywhere else) its just made for this kind of stuff. If there are JS you might be able to inlude them into the working process of Light Table. Lets see, its a nice idea.
Re: The future is specific
#125Recently I was thinking maybe software industry is too much obsessive about tool making. I wouldn't mind spending much more time and effort using a bad IDE re-factoring bad code that works good and cures cancer. I don't really care how awesome the static analysis tool I am using, or how awesome the meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta programming language I am using if I work on pointless product. Maybe I am wrong…
This 'problem' is old. Even the Hackers in the 60s didn't often do anything 'real'. The made tools to make it easier to make other tools, and so on. The think is that WHEN you want to develop something real you want to have these tools ready to go.
With your aditued there will not be that much progress, since everybody would have just said 'mmhh lets not develop a good compiler for C lets write assembler'. In my opinion as long as people develop better tools (languages, IDEs, compilers, debuggers) there is need for them. If one guy spends a couple of month on a Tool, how long will it take until the time saved is 'recoverd' by the users of that tool? Making tools yileds economic benefit, just like in the real word a maschine that does something better or faster will result in economic benefit.
That is not do say there is never mal-investment. Somebody might spend a long time developing something and nobody will use it, programming related or not. This however is not an argument for no innovation.
Re: The future is specific
#126The flask example is the really pertinent one to me. Those were all the views that you need when working on a web app and it would be awesome to have them all come up automatically like that. It's possible to make emacs show you all those views by manually opening up frames and finding the right code, and emacs can even render html (but really, use your browser of choice for that). I'm sure it would be possible to wr…
Im guessing but you should be able to use any JVM language on the server and any language that compiles to JS on the client. If you want to do more visual stuff then the framework allready does you problebly want get around html and css.
With some work it would probebly be possible to make the Server IPA more general.
Re: The future is specific
#127The first time I heard about Light Table I was rather critical but this begins to look like something that could really replace vim for me. This is rather surprising given my general distaste of IDEs.
>>but this begins to look like something that could really replace vim for me.
The Irony! If you find this is what is supposed to replace Vim for you, then Emacs already replaces vim.
He is talking of Extensible Macros for . And Emacs is Extensible Macros for Taco Editor.
I guess what you want is Emacs.
Re: The future is specific
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't you build a LightTable-like IDE in Squeak right now?
Squeak is somewhat LightTable-like already, except everything needs to be refreshed manually. (And not all of it is obvious to the beginner, though all of it is readily available if you know how.) You actually couldn't have everything update automatically and expect bad things never to happen. Functional programming has an advantage here.
Is Light Table written in Haskell-like language? Because other functional language still allow side effect and IO and running everything in those language can still cause bad things.
Re: The future is specific
#129The key line for me here is that the future is in 'easily created domain specific experiences'. I think this is very eloquently stated and can't agree more. I like what Light table is trying to do, hoewver it is still working in pretty much the same 'domain' space as existing IDE's ('code'), and trying to improve on the 'easily created... experiences' part. As the post is waxing lyrical, my piece to add to the broad-…
We showed examples that relate very cleanly to "normal coding", but what we ultimately want to see is exactly what you're describing. There are so many places where a thin veil over the implementation would be immensely useful, presenting new interfaces for things like working with physics simulations, financial models, etc etc.
Re: The future is specific
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm fine with profit-seeking, but GNU projects like Emacs tend to be too fundamental to allow a proprietary solution to predominate. (Cf. gcc) I'm fine paying for servers, for contractors, services, random productivity-ware like Pivotal Tracker etc. but I'm never going to be okay with subjecting my development environment, something I've honed for years and years, to fee extraction or proprietary control by a commerc…
He doesn't have to cater to you or me and I think it would be a mistake to do so. Visual Studio is very popular... When Light Table comes out, at the end of the day I'll still be using vim and I suspect most emacs users will still be using emacs. We're not the target audience. I disagree that Light Table needs to be anything like emacs to dominate, it can even have a proprietary license, it can skip over us just as E…
>He doesn't have to cater to you or me
You're right.
>I think it would be a mistake to do so.
Maybe.
>Visual Studio is very popular... When Light Table comes out
Does not follow. Visual Studio users will NOT be using Light Table even if they're aware of its existence (and they won't be, save for the few poor bastards working in Microsoft-land and reading HN).
Light Table, in terms of addressable market, is really only talking to grumpy hackers like me and startup people. Maybe particularly keen hobbyists who are good at following the state of the art.
> We're not the target audience.
Then why is his open source community (Clojure) and people he's reached mostly involve exactly our target audience?
>I'd rather that be the case and see a pretty end-product that serves its original goals well (and I may even try it for fun if it's free) than having a half-baked "vim-mode" stuck on at the end just to try and attract me.
That is...not what I was talking about. Did you even read what I said?
I was talking about freedom, not bolting it onto an existing editor. The point is that I don't want to Monsanto-ify my tools and be dependent on an unaccountable commercial entity for how I work.