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Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

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Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#2
As if money would magically make hard things happen :)

Seriously, what if Python is specially hard to support for some reason? I feel if it was in the easy-to-medium-hard space, there would be a Slime port to Python, and if there isn't, its because its probably hard...

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#8
post #2

As if money would magically make hard things happen :) Seriously, what if Python is specially hard to support for some reason? I feel if it was in the easy-to-medium-hard space, there would be a Slime port to Python, and if there isn't, its because its probably hard...

>As if money would magically make hard things happen :)

If those hard things require people working full-time on solving them, then yes, money does magically makes them happen.

>Seriously, what if Python is specially hard to support for some reason?

This is engineering and computer science, there are no magical reasons, only specifics. What would make Python difficult to support exactly? It has full introspection, several IDEs like PyCharm, it's straightforward to parse, it has a REPL, etc etc. I don't see how Python is harder to support than say Smalltalk (which had excellent IDE environments 20 years ago).

>I feel if it was in the easy-to-medium-hard space, there would be a Slime port to Python, and if there isn't, its because its probably hard...

Or maybe whether a Slime port exists or not reflects just the lack of any volunteers to undertake the effort and the lack of commercial interest too. Not to mention that Slime, IIRC, is for Lisp like languages. What would Python had to do with it?

Re: Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support

#9
post #2

As if money would magically make hard things happen :) Seriously, what if Python is specially hard to support for some reason? I feel if it was in the easy-to-medium-hard space, there would be a Slime port to Python, and if there isn't, its because its probably hard...

> Seriously, what if Python is specially hard to support for some reason?

Many of the cool features in LightTable are already supported by fancy python interpreters like iPython and bPython.

LightTable must either implement a Python parser and a partial interpreter/evaluator that is used to analyze call graphs and such or use the relevant parts from the Python core. Not a simple task to implement (and maintain) but most definitely doable.

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