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The future is specific

chris-granger.com

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Re: The future is specific

#71

Post by adeelk »

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…

> But its really wrong to say IDE's like Eclipse don't do one specific task well. Eclipse really makes Java programming very easy.

“Making Java programming easy” is not one specific task!

Re: The future is specific

#72

Post by silverlake »

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…

Couldn't you build a LightTable-like IDE in Squeak right now?

Re: The future is specific

#73

Post by its_so_on »

March of the specific.

Google didn't win by being the best general-purpose search, where people go to look for anything on the Internet. It won by being the best for searching only um, okay not the best example.

Facebook didn't just raise 14billion at a valuation of 100billion by being the best general-purpose social network, where just anyone would have a profile. It won by being the best network for, uh.. Okay, not the best example.

Well, take a revolutionary new product like the iPad. It doesn't have hundreds or thousands of apps to do uh, hold on. I'm sure that somewhere there's the ONE thing that it does. Uh, it's a screen?

Look, step back. There's only one thing you can do in Photoshop. I mean there's just one thing to use Ubuntu for. Sorry, I meant that when you say the word 'Harvard' everyone knows what the ONE thing that they teach is!

Okay, look, these might not be the BEST examples in the world. Take a pair of jeans. There is ONE time and ONE place to, uh.

Fuck. I'm done. If the future is anything like the present, nobody even knows what the fuck business Amazon is in anymore.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AMZN+Interactive#symbol=a...;

The future is the very opposite of the word "specific".

Re: The future is specific

#74

Post by frendiversity »

I'd rather see Light Table features integrated into Eclipse, as creating something as fully featured as Eclipse is...

...going to end up being Eclipse.

So either a massive wheel is being reinvented, or Light Table will be absent of all standard IDE features and consist of the flashy neato Code Bubbles stuff and not much more.

That said, I say develop the hell out of the Light Table concept for all the "new age" (circa 196X) dynamic coder people since their IDEs tend to suck, and let's hope it becomes a standard and we can implement it all in everything else. :)

Re: The future is specific

#75

Post by prospero »

its_so_on wrote: post #73

March of the specific. Google didn't win by being the best general-purpose search, where people go to look for anything on the Internet. It won by being the best for searching only um, okay not the best example. Facebook didn't just raise 14billion at a valuation of 100billion by being the best general-purpose social network, where just anyone would have a profile. It won by being the best network for, uh.. Okay, not…

All of your examples are gestalts. They're not single seamless abstractions, they're patchworks that are more than the sum of their parts.

That's precisely what is being proposed here: a platform for creating a development environment that is more than the sum of its parts. Something that gives you composable pieces that can be fit together into something that maps directly onto your problem space.

Is this really so unclear? I can't picture the hypothetical product that you're arguing against.

Re: The future is specific

#76

Post by lucian1900 »

stcredzero wrote: post #57
ibdknox wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lisp is the extension language :) Everything so far is Clojure + ClojureScript with the language backends written in the language they support (python in python and so on)

How about Stallman's idea for GUILE (Scheme) uber-alles. Do source-to-source translation of approximations of the supported languages to Clojure. This would allow everyone access to almost everything in the tool.

That effort hasn't even materialised for Scheme+Elisp for Emacs.

The whole approach is guaranteed to not produce a perfectly compliant of any other language.

Re: The future is specific

#77

Post by roguecoder »

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…

An Eclipse plugin usually takes me about half a day at this point. It's not good for short scripts, but these examples don't seem to be that either.

For the "20 minutes later" version, I typically abuse JUnit tests, or use search+working sets.

What Eclipse misses more than anything else is performance and generalization. It's sufficient for my Java work: it is insufficient for my four-language code base.

Re: The future is specific

#79

Post by anoplus »

Recently 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 and those tools are the only way for real breakthroughs in bioinformatics.

what do you think?

Re: The future is specific

#80

Post by pavel_lishin »

krupan wrote: post #61

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 wr…

I spent this morning fiddling with elisp to get emacs to do something I wanted. On the one hand, it's incredibly annoying, considering that I don't know anything about elisp. On the other hand, I figured out what I needed, and now it's a little easier.

On the gripping hand, there's zero chance that I'll be trying to replicate that functionality in emacs. Even with the wiki, and it's random ~/Desktop/elisp_notes.ver2.txt feel, isn't that helpful.

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