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The future is specific

chris-granger.com

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Re: The future is specific

#91

Post by JimmyL »

spiffworks wrote: post #81
JimmyL wrote: post #41

>> The future of tools isn't in a better Eclipse or Visual Studio, it's in easily created domain specific experiences. How is that goal different from that of the Eclipse platform ( http://www.eclipse.org/platform/overview.php ) - a common base where people can develop individual add-ons to suit the domain they're working on? Eclipse platform and LT clearly have different interaction models and technologies, but from…

> But you know what else is pretty good? PyDev It's not. It's really not. I've heard good things about PyCharm, but the best environment for Python that I have seen so far is Emacs. And Light Table definitely looks like an improvement on that. My only concern with this is the speed. I want this to have the same response time as Emacs or Vim. Then there would be no reason not to use it.

I specifically chose the description "pretty good" (as opposed to "great" or something more flowery) for PyDev, because I think that best summarizes it. It's got a number of issues with it (and it's sometimes as slow as a dog), but for the hobby developer it's more than enough.

Once I started working in Python and spending 30-something hours/week in the environment, its flaws started to overcome its benefits (namely: it was free, and I knew how to use it), and it was time to move to PyCharm...which is also slow, unless you throw a few gigs of RAM at it and at which point it becomes amazing.

Re: The future is specific

#92

Post by ckluis »

As a non-developer. I would love this for php & wordpress.

Here me out: the people who aren't in IDE's all day could benefit the most from this. They don't know where the functions are or even how to find them sometimes. I resort to google 9/10 when looking for how some functions.

This has huge applications for helping non-programmers become programmers.

Re: The future is specific

#93

Post by radicalbyte »

skrebbel wrote: post #89

A 'macro system for tools'. Isn't this what the academic bozos call Language Workbenches? Extensible tool-building platforms for DSLs are hardly anything new. Reading things like this, i sometimes worry that the HN-circling web crowd is reinventing things that others invented just a few years ago. Like some sort of collective not-invented-here syndrome. E.g. Check out MetaEdit+ - their website isn't Silicon Valley Se…

> 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 disciplines).

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.

The HN crowd are pretty much the polar opposite: the focus is on simplicity and scale. Sharing knowledge, instead of locking it up for fun and "profit".

That's why I like it here :)

Re: The future is specific

#94

Post by zcam »

Arelius wrote: post #53
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…

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…

Also emacs provides an extensive platform with tons of modes to support pretty much anything you can throw at it, works in a terminal if needed, has an abstraction over files (buffers), debuggers, easy modes for vi/cua users, can connect to browser instance if needed and tons more.

Building a lighttable mode or even several small modes (libraries vs framework) for emacs would make more sense.

It is going to require a huge effort to duplicate a fraction of what it provides already.

But from a marketing point of view it is/was probably smarter to show eye candy to attract funding, but I am not sure it is the best route in the long run.

Re: The future is specific

#95

Post by misuba »

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 those Facebook profiles: all different, all highly customizable. Specific.

All those hundreds of thousands of iPad apps: mostly very specific, some wildly so.

Increasingly these days, every business Amazon gets into, it builds a different interface for. Certainly that's the case with their electronic and downloadable offerings.

Even Google web search is fairly specific when viewed in context of their putative mission to organize the world's information. It sure doesn't look like Groups (and thank god for that).

And Light Table itself: not very specific. A general platform.

The word "platform" is key, I think. The link discusses what we put on our platforms.

Re: The future is specific

#96

Post by lnguyen »

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.

At it's core, Eclipse is really good at Java. It's why it killed off Visual Cafe and most other commercial IDEs (was sad to see Borland go).

The issue is that it's more than just a Java language editor. Once you load it up with all the extras to accommodate development models, frameworks, runtimes, build processes, etc. it does become an unwieldy mess. But it's really hard not to considering how moving parts large-scale development has.

Re: The future is specific

#97

Post by d0mine »

espeed wrote: post #45
bnegreve wrote: post #13

Being specific is not a feature, this is what you do when you have no other way to solve a problem. The ambitious challenge raised by Light Table was to generalize Bret Victor's ideas to general programming, if they are unable to do this, I'll stick to my IDE.

In case anyone is wondering: "Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle" ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII )

Thank you for the link.

Make tools to be extensions of our bodies via immediate feedback is a useful idea (it is not the main point of talk, but it stands out to me).

As a side note: It might be even be literally true for physical tools i.e., a brain can physically change to see the tool as an extension of the hand (from a study about ape, its brain, and a stick).

Re: The future is specific

#98

Post by Arelius »

zcam wrote: post #94
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…

Also emacs provides an extensive platform with tons of modes to support pretty much anything you can throw at it, works in a terminal if needed, has an abstraction over files (buffers), debuggers, easy modes for vi/cua users, can connect to browser instance if needed and tons more. Building a lighttable mode or even several small modes (libraries vs framework) for emacs would make more sense. It is going to require a…

The advantage of LightTable's approach is that using HTML, is a simple, trivially extensible and powerful way to provide advanced UI widgeting, something modern emacs supports very poorly. Mostly due to working in a terminal if needed, but I think it holds it back a bit. The closest thing we have in emacs is pixmap support, which is poor, and painful to use!

Though, is LightTable the best/easiest way to get that? I don't know, it may be easier to render emacs buffers into a webkit view, it may also not be.

Re: The future is specific

#99

Post by mtrimpe »

ibdknox wrote: post #31
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…

These were examples of extensions to make a point and not at all what we'll be focusing on. What we're making sure of is that the platform for such things exists and enables all of the things that old UI's and such don't allow. I think the parallel to emacs is a good one and while I certainly won't say at this point that we'll be the "modern emacs", it's our hope we can come close.

It might have been better to demonstrate this with examples like:

  truth-tables for (nested) if statements
  petri-nets for a state machine
  etc. etc. etc.

Re: The future is specific

#100

Post by Arelius »

phyzome wrote: post #86
mattbriggs wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

out of curiosity, is js going to be your "elisp"?

Clojurescript, actually -- a Clojure dialect that compiles to JS. Well, Clojure too, on the server side of things.

Are we really gonna need the JVM running the backend for this? That seems so unnecessary.
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