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Light Table - a new IDE concept

chris-granger.com

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Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept

#201

Post by shabble »

Mad_Dud wrote: post #153
agentultra wrote: post #142

It looks a lot like what I already do with Emacs. Is Light Table also programmable in the language it's written in? I find extensibility and compose-ability far more important in an editor than any single feature alone. Cool demo. I like the idea of alternate real-time visualizations of my code; especially in large and unfamiliar systems.

Could you name the modes, which help you accomplish live-debug and 1-click documentation effects?

You might also find eldoc-mode[1] and it's various mode-specific children (c-, perl-, ...) to a useful minor-mode. It displays a short string describing the function-at-point, and the order and name of it's arguments. Sort of zero-click docs. Whatever way it does it could probably be hacked up to display more complete docs in a split window or frame. Something I'll think about when I finally get an SSD :)

[1] http://emacswiki.org/emacs/ElDoc

Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept

#202

Post by rosejn »

Great concept. This is kind of similar to an editor we've been talking about for Overtone. How about,

* allow for render plugin functions so values can be rendered with images, rendered canvases, control elements, etc.

* treat the AST as the primary data for each function or form, and then make the source code one of multiple renderings of the data.

- makes paredit type manipulations just operations on the ast

- allow for decorating the ast with additional data, which can be rendered with plugins (for example, heat-up regions of code as a profiler runs)

Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept

#204

Post by rogerbinns »

cs702 wrote: post #196

Light Table looks brilliant and clearly deserves much success... but I can't help but wonder if it will ever catch on as much as I'd hope, because the alternative -- using plain-text files -- is (IMO) a canonical example of the simple-to-implement, New-Jersey-style, worse-is-better approach. As comments elsewhere in this thread (e.g., see stcredzero's and gfodor's comments) detail, the ideas behind Light Table have b…

Light Table has problems for non-trivial code anyway. What happens when functions have side effects like deleting files? Most of my code involves networking, especially Android devices talking to http servers providing functionality that has state. Things don't run in isolation, there are databases involved and code can't be called willy nilly.

And a lot of code is about error handling. In addition to the normal path I really need to see the flow through the problems - permissions issues, timeouts, resource limits, service failures etc.

Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept

#206

Post by marshray »

sehugg wrote: post #41

Whenever I get the chance to use a spreadsheet, I really enjoy it. I find it really satisfying to set up cascading functions and see them update in real-time. I'd like to see that experience translated to general programming. I'd like to update code and see the unit tests update automatically, and an understandable representation of the objects being manipulated.

The Haskell folks have developed some combinators for automatic test case generation that might fit well with this project.

QuickCheck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickCheck

Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept

#208

Post by alcapwned »

rosejn wrote: post #202

Great concept. This is kind of similar to an editor we've been talking about for Overtone. How about, * allow for render plugin functions so values can be rendered with images, rendered canvases, control elements, etc. * treat the AST as the primary data for each function or form, and then make the source code one of multiple renderings of the data. - makes paredit type manipulations just operations on the ast - allo…

Perhaps you could make comments part of the ast decoration. Hover over a function call and the IDE can popup a display showing comments for that function. The popup could be easily switched back and forth between comments, the parameter list, or possibly other info about the function. The comments could be plain-text, rendered HTML, or even crazier stuff like audio/video recordings for particularly important comments.

People could choose whether they wanted comments rendered inline with code like usual or displayed elsewhere.

Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept

#209

Post by alcapwned »

rosejn wrote: post #202

Great concept. This is kind of similar to an editor we've been talking about for Overtone. How about, * allow for render plugin functions so values can be rendered with images, rendered canvases, control elements, etc. * treat the AST as the primary data for each function or form, and then make the source code one of multiple renderings of the data. - makes paredit type manipulations just operations on the ast - allo…

Perhaps you could make comments part of the ast decoration. Hover over a function call and the IDE can popup a display showing comments for that function. The popup could be easily switched back and forth between comments, the parameter list, or possibly other info about the function. The comments could be plain-text, rendered HTML, or even crazier stuff like audio/video recordings for particularly important comments.

People could choose whether they wanted comments rendered inline with code like usual or displayed elsewhere.

Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept

#210

Post by alcapwned »

rosejn wrote: post #202

Great concept. This is kind of similar to an editor we've been talking about for Overtone. How about, * allow for render plugin functions so values can be rendered with images, rendered canvases, control elements, etc. * treat the AST as the primary data for each function or form, and then make the source code one of multiple renderings of the data. - makes paredit type manipulations just operations on the ast - allo…

Perhaps you could make comments part of the ast decoration. Hover over a function call and the IDE can popup a display showing comments for that function. The popup could be easily switched back and forth between comments, the parameter list, or possibly other info about the function. The comments could be plain-text, rendered HTML, or even crazier stuff like audio/video recordings for particularly important comments.

People could choose whether they wanted comments rendered inline with code like usual or displayed elsewhere.

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