Out in the Open: These Hackers Want to Give You Coding Superpowers
Sorry for being "that guy" - but this article reads like a sensationalist press release, without actually releasing any (new) press.
I'm just not getting how this is all that different from something like Eclipse, which compiles code while you're writing it, displays error messages in real time, and allows you to gain a sense of what the code is doing (which method is called) by mousing over methods. Is this a way to make life that much easier or is it the same basic idea?
Is it just me, or is LightTable still pretty far from their original promise?
I downloaded the app a few weeks ago, and I never saw anything that gave me realtime feedback on my coding. I admit, I was just playing around with putting in the odd function and variable, but it didn't give me anything submlime text doesn't currently.
As far as the spending ' hours or days working on code before they can make sure it actually works', isn't this solved with TDD?
I loved how it displayed code in functions in separate tiles, instead of all concatenated together in a long file. And it shows the code for the other functions being called, in their own tiles.
The video in the linked article is a good short explanation of how the tool works. You can skip the hype in the article.
I think this concept could represent a significant advance in IDEs. I don't care if it's a new idea or not, it's a gorgeous implementation of the concept.
The amount of negativity in this thread is amazing. I've watched the video and I'm positively impressed. The demo is building the insight why is my code / unit test computing a certain value with instant feedback and full information of the whole call chain. It's far from perfect, but it's miles better than writing a unit test, having it fail, scratching your head, adding some log statements / breakpoints, re-running the code, doing a little tweak, oops, still broken, lather, rinse, repeat. REPL is poking at the problem through a tiny keyhole and Light Table is opening the door and shining the light on the full behavior of the code. No more playing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant.
Light Table is a nifty concept, but it's hardly anything revolutionary like this article portrays it.
Especially this:
The problem with coding, he says, is that you can’t see the results of your work until after you’re done.
Which basically describes a REPL (although LT features a real-time one, still not a new idea by any means).
I am pretty sure I've heard of Light Table here a few times. It's hard to be sure though since Microsoft's LightSwitch (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ff796201.aspx) which is almost identically named and has almost the identical purpose. That is, making programming easier for everyone including non-programmers.
I was about to forward this to a friend of mine who has several ideas for web startups but lacks all technical skills and is therefore waiting for the time "any day now" that non-programmers will be able to generate programs as fast, cheap and maintainable as programmers. But then I saw the website and realized he would have no idea what the heck it is from their elevator pitch:
Light Table is a new interactive IDE that lets you modify running programs and embed anything from websites to games. It provides the real time feedback we need to not only answer questions about our code, but to understand how our programs really work
That has to be about the least useful description of what it does I can think of.
Yes! Hope guys like Chris & Rob at LT (and/or Bret Victor) will succeed in reinventing programming - making it more tangible and visual. Programming doesn't need to be that tedious!
Light Table is bigger than Jesus now.
The article is badly written. For example,
> The problem with coding, he says, is that you can’t see the results of your work until after you’re done. In that sense, programming is unlike almost every other craft. “When a chef adds an ingredient, he can smell it, he can taste it,” Granger says. “When an artist makes a stroke on a canvas, he can see it. But programming isn’t that way.”
The rest of us would say we just run our unit tests in a couple of seconds and call it a day. At least, if you didn't watch the video.
The video shows a potentially useful tool (on Clojure no less). It's more about watching the propagation of values through code, than it is about "feedback" per se.