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The future is specific

chris-granger.com

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Re: The future is specific

#61

Post by krupan »

The 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 write the elisp to have it do it all almost as automagically and smoothly as light-table (but not with rounded corners). The problem is, if I'm a python expert writing python web-apps, breaking out elisp to script up an environment like this is just too daunting. Instead I usually just keep checking back at the emacs wiki to see if anyone else has done it for me... (should I admit that?)

Is Light Table going to solve that problem? Unfortunately this blog post and the videos don't demonstrate how you create these modes. Do you have to become a clojure, clojurescript, html5, css expert?

Re: The future is specific

#62

Post by inportb »

why-el wrote: post #47
inportb wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> minus Eclipse programming in Java would be a very frustrating experience I'm not sure about that... Eclipse gets fatter and slower with each release. Of course, I still use it because Google really wants Android developers to do so. In my opinion, the most frustrating thing about using Eclipse for Android work is that it crashes every time I try to export a package, unless I close every open file and restart Eclips…

I face similar issues at work but I don't think Eclipse's issue is Java, else you're saying that anything developed in Java will face a "boated" fate. Eclipse's problem is exactly what Chris mentioned in the article, ok on most things and awesome at none. Edit: Typos.

Indeed, it's not all Java's fault. But I think Java does contribute to the overhead because my experience with Java programs in general usually involves long startup time and excessive memory usage.

(And then there's the UI bloat, which makes Eclipse look like this by default: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geofharries/5145925147/sizes/o/... >. But that's a totally different issue. Thank goodness for Fast View.)

Re: The future is specific

#63

Post by why-el »

inportb wrote: post #62
why-el wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I face similar issues at work but I don't think Eclipse's issue is Java, else you're saying that anything developed in Java will face a "boated" fate. Eclipse's problem is exactly what Chris mentioned in the article, ok on most things and awesome at none. Edit: Typos.

Indeed, it's not all Java's fault. But I think Java does contribute to the overhead because my experience with Java programs in general usually involves long startup time and excessive memory usage. (And then there's the UI bloat, which makes Eclipse look like this by default: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geofharries/5145925147/sizes/o/... >. But that's a totally different issue. Thank goodness for Fast View.)

I see your point there. I myself tolerate Eclipse on Ubuntu, where the UI surprisingly fits, at least for me. Its almost indistinguishable from other UIs, except maybe Spotify which is (IMO) way ahead of the rest. But I cant stand Eclipse on my Mac OS X and there you can see all the stuff you mentioned.

Re: The future is specific

#64

Post by peterhajas »

djKianoosh wrote: post #32
SudarshanP wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is so sad that Vimeo is blocked by many Indian ISPs for silly reasons. The whole Internet feels crippled. There must have been at least a dozen videos I wanted to watch today that were recklessly censored. Thanks for the youtube link. I think we need a Redundant Array of Cloud Videos.

off topic, but dont feel bad, vimeo and youtube are both blocked at DHS.

Do you mean the Department of Homeland Security?

Re: The future is specific

#65

Post by heretohelp »

ibdknox wrote: post #55
Arelius wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I worry about Light Table is what it won't be from Emacs. At the end of the day, Emacs is still a text editor, and still edits files. This means that I really can use it for anything, doesn't matter if I have a mode for it, or an embedded compiler/REPL. It still just works, and we can't forget this if we want a modern Emacs. Emacs was born in a world of textfiles, Light Table shows us a post-textfile world, but…

From the bottom of the post: "If you couple [DSTs] with the generalized editing capabilities I showed last time, you have what we believe to be the future of tools: an environment that you are able to mold to the exact shape of your problem." I agree, we have no intention of removing general editing - you need it as much as anything else at this point.

I'm more deeply concerned about the fact that Emacs is something which, roughly speaking, I can control. Emacs is a community project. Your project appears to be commercial in nature, regardless of whether or not it's open source. Your project will also be a dictatorship by dint of the fact that it belongs to you.

Why should I trust you to provide the most fundamental tool in my work?

Re: The future is specific

#66

Post by ibdknox »

heretohelp wrote: post #65
ibdknox wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the bottom of the post: "If you couple [DSTs] with the generalized editing capabilities I showed last time, you have what we believe to be the future of tools: an environment that you are able to mold to the exact shape of your problem." I agree, we have no intention of removing general editing - you need it as much as anything else at this point.

I'm more deeply concerned about the fact that Emacs is something which, roughly speaking, I can control. Emacs is a community project. Your project appears to be commercial in nature, regardless of whether or not it's open source. Your project will also be a dictatorship by dint of the fact that it belongs to you. Why should I trust you to provide the most fundamental tool in my work?

It will probably be under the GPL just like Emacs, so I'm not sure I understand the concern?

Re: The future is specific

#67

Post by catenate »

stcredzero wrote: post #54
kamaal wrote: post #26

I don't mind if the future is specific. But its really wrong to say IDE's like Eclipse don't do one specific task well. Eclipse really makes Java programming very easy. And I can tell you minus Eclipse programming in Java would be a very frustrating experience, given the verbosity, configuration mess and XML's all over the place. Eclipse these days is advanced enough to really blur the difference between and novice a…

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 with the middle mouse button, and release the middle mouse button to run the paragraph through |fmt and replace it in place.

With this I can leverage anything I can call from the command line, in any language, to be part of my editor. No need to rewrite tools in the program's specific extension language, whether Elisp or Smalltalk or Clojure.

As another example, since it's so easy to just run a shell command from Acme (highlight the command text and middle-click it), I'm constantly customizing pre-written shell commands to e.g. grep for lines in code (to the point of creating indexes on the fly for files), and then right-clicking on grep -n output to jump to a specific line in a file.

Re: The future is specific

#68

Post by Arelius »

ibdknox wrote: post #66
heretohelp wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm more deeply concerned about the fact that Emacs is something which, roughly speaking, I can control. Emacs is a community project. Your project appears to be commercial in nature, regardless of whether or not it's open source. Your project will also be a dictatorship by dint of the fact that it belongs to you. Why should I trust you to provide the most fundamental tool in my work?

It will probably be under the GPL just like Emacs, so I'm not sure I understand the concern?

I think the fear is in the "probably". YCombinator, for instance, doesn't have a good record of doing things just for the community good, they are after all profit seeking.

That's not to say it won't happen, but the fear is there.

Re: The future is specific

#69

Post by cwilson »

I'm specifically excited about Light Table (and the second half of this video where he dives into Python/Flask), because as a front-end guy, I generally spend most of my time in views/templates. I occasionally have to dive into models however, and it seems to me Light Table would help me navigate something I consider a bit of a wild west much more efficiently, resulting in learning much faster.

Basically, I'm excited about Light Table because I think it will help me become a better programmer.

Re: The future is specific

#70

Post by gaius »

nebiros wrote: post #3

RUUUUUUBBBBYYYYY SUUUUPPPOOOORRRTTTTT!

Dear Rubyists/rockstar ninjas/brogrammers/whatever you're calling yourselves this week: please stay well away from whatever community develops around Light Table.
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