I always wonder how can live preview work with I/O statements, like selecting/inserting from/to database.
Can you forbid REPL to execute such statements? And then somehow mock that data for live preview?
Light Table - a new IDE concept
281–290 of 315 posts
Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept
#282I always wonder how can live preview work with I/O statements, like selecting/inserting from/to database.
Can you forbid REPL to execute such statements? And then somehow mock that data for live preview?
Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting stuff, I'm quite new to programming, could you please recommend some reading materials to get acquainted with these ideas? As a newbie, I'd like to educate myself so I can contribute to the "right" projects for this time and learn to avoid the tarpits.
Here are some links: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy http://t.co/cJgpnX5B http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4BFC3F13B846707B http://books.google.com/books/about/Mindstorms.html?id=HhIEA... http://worrydream.com/ http://vpri.org/ Part 4 primarily of: http://www.amazon.com/The-Design-Essays-Computer-Scientist/d...
Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah sorry about that. I wish I could forget about *.frx and regsvr32 and VSS.
Registering versioned DLLs in Microsoft Transaction Server so that IIS could proxy requests from IE5.5's RDS ActiveX control to allow async callbacks on your 1999 intranet? Priceless. Those DLLs calling functions in highly specific versions of the library that talks MS Exchange Server's data store protocol? Even more priceless. Rebuilding an NT box from scratch because a junior developer accidentally installed a new…
I've got plenty of stories just like that from the mid-90's
And this is precisely why I don't think it's a good idea to try and abstract crap away like the damn filesystem for software development/IDE. I bet it would be cheaper, less complex and for the overall good to instead teach developers how to wrangle files(if that really is a problem worth solving)
I wonder if it's time for a "I used to have to work with Microsoft Tech in the 90's" Meetup/Support Group :)
Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spreadsheets would be nicer if they had a coherent dataflow model. Some spreadsheet programs do this automatically, but it could be a great place for a visual programming language too. One ugly pattern that I'm often doing is to set a column with values by the function "A3=A2" and dragging that down. This gives a column of constant values which are tweakable by tweaking just the first element. That's what a scalar va…
Spreadsheets would be nicer if they had a coherent dataflow model. What do you mean by "coherent dataflow model"? (I'm working on these problems - hence all the questions.) This gives a column of constant values which are tweakable by tweaking just the first element. That's what a scalar variable looks like in a spreadsheet. Why not just put the value in a cell and reference that cell absolutely? With some visual tin…
(1) You're right, I should have explained that more. I wanted to contrast this with something like "spreadsheets today have a datum-flow model" but a nice phrasing didn't come to me and I posted without remembering to insert the missing sentence.
What I mean is that spreadsheets are (right now) fundamentally based on the idea of a grid of cells which are individually meaningless and can contain anything, any individual datum, and datums may refer to each other by arbitrary operations. This grid view might be a good way to present datums to users but it requires a style convention when you want to write it to be readable; it encourages styles which obscure your ability to actually see what this sheet does.
It's not just that you can't see how the data flows, although that's part of it -- it's that the data is allowed to flow in ways that you could never easily visualize in the first place. Imagine that we simply draw the "depends on" relation by drawing a little curvy arrow from A to B if B depends on A. The Excel equivalent of "spaghetti code" could then literally look like spaghetti on the spreadsheet -- it would have neither head nor tail.
This could be solved with a nice model for how data, not individual datums, are allowed to flow through the application. Calculating a velocity might be as simple as writing "(x - last(x))/(t - last(t))", if x and t accepted vector subtractions and last(q)[i] == q[i - 1].
(2) I'm not entirely sure what you think the referring code is doing, if not putting the values in cells and referencing those cells. The reason why I can't be "absolute" about it is because in Calc (and Excel the last time I used it), to extend a computation over a vector, you highlight the computation and then click in a resizing corner to resize it into an area parallel to the input vectors -- or else you use some right-click "Fill" tool.
I used to think that these tools were broken but I think I can now appreciate that, because their model is so easily grasped, it's not really a break if it's hard to say, "no! I wanted this parameter fixed.
(3) That sounds suspicious. mean(v) should be associated with the column v in a clear way.
Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spreadsheets would be nicer if they had a coherent dataflow model. What do you mean by "coherent dataflow model"? (I'm working on these problems - hence all the questions.) This gives a column of constant values which are tweakable by tweaking just the first element. That's what a scalar variable looks like in a spreadsheet. Why not just put the value in a cell and reference that cell absolutely? With some visual tin…
Maybe by "coherent dataflow model" he means some separation between what's an input to any given operation, so you can see what data is going where and how instead of it being scattered all over the place. That's what I'd like, anyway. What it looks like to me is more like a program than a table, but with really good list/table entry and flow arrangement tools. That may just be because I'm a programmer. Can you share…
There's an aspect of that, too. I'm especially influenced by the circuit diagrams in G, the language which you program in when using LabVIEW. Basically most of the system, except for loops, looks like one big circuit. (Since loops are ugly because they're nonfunctional, I have wasted some time trying to think of what the Haskell version of G would look like, how you would embed monads in the circuit elements, and so forth.)
Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spreadsheets would be nicer if they had a coherent dataflow model. What do you mean by "coherent dataflow model"? (I'm working on these problems - hence all the questions.) This gives a column of constant values which are tweakable by tweaking just the first element. That's what a scalar variable looks like in a spreadsheet. Why not just put the value in a cell and reference that cell absolutely? With some visual tin…
Maybe by "coherent dataflow model" he means some separation between what's an input to any given operation, so you can see what data is going where and how instead of it being scattered all over the place. That's what I'd like, anyway. What it looks like to me is more like a program than a table, but with really good list/table entry and flow arrangement tools. That may just be because I'm a programmer. Can you share…
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Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept
#288Clear and concise video. You really did a great job here Chris. My only critique is that I am now aware of what I am missing for my Java projects.
Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I agree. Textmate made a crap ton of money, companies like JetBrains and DevExpress have made very successful businesses building dev tools. And while you mention MSFT as building a platform, if VS alone can make a billion, even without a platform I suspect you could do quite well.
Would you mind me asking how long it took you to develop that demo?
On Twitter he said it took six days: https://twitter.com/#!/ibdknox/status/190857331238645760
Re: Light Table - a new IDE concept
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
We might not want the hassle of dealing with files and folders all the time, but I sometimes worry that a new generation of "programmers" will emerge who have no understanding of how the underlying filesystem works.
I sometimes worry that a new generation of "programmers" will emerge who have no understanding of how the underlying anything works. For as useful as sites like stackoverflow are for sharing knowledge, it is potentially encouraging a generation of copy/paste coders who's job it is to find and glue snippets together until they get the desired outcome. Maybe I'm getting old, but I'm starting think some knowledge needs…
Speaking of file conflicts:
I'm picturing an alternate universe in which 'the database' stands in for 'the filesystem'. Data is laid out in a manner logical for its origins. Most programs use the library-provided implementation, of course, but there is a little more variability than in our world.
People have spent the past fifty odd years writing utility programs for manipulating databases instead of files, so concerns like 'moving' data between programs are still basically trivial.
In that universe functions really are the basic building block of code, and the database engine's consistency guarantees handle editing conflicts implicitly (with logging for version control, of course). Too bad, perhaps, that we're here rather than there.
Thoughts, criticisms, elaborations?