Saturday, April 14, 2012

"Light Table" IDE

Chris Granger talks about the "Light Table" IDE prototype. It doesn't remind me of anything :-)

The core interesting idea is presenting code with the values replaced based on evaluation as you're coding. That's pretty neat, but it's not clear to me how that scales up when the list of things you're executing doesn't fit on the screen any more, or when you start having loops that call the same code many times. But interesting ideas.

2 comments:

  1. A friend of mind -- a sys admin by trade, not a programmer -- told me about Light Table just a day or two ago. He read about it at some hacker news site and raved about how futuristic it seemed.

    I told him what it also didn't remind me of, either. ;-)

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  2. Incidentally, I think the solution to the too-much-stuff-on-the-screen problem is to take the paradigm 3D. I envision some zooming in/out and flipping around and perhaps specialized gesture support being essential to making it something one could work productively in.

    I've been off-and-on goofing with writing a Smalltalk script engine for FireMonkey, which I call FireScript. FireMonkey is the new cross-platform GPU-savvy UI framework for Delphi/C++ Builder. Currently it runs on Windows & Mac.

    The Light Table visual really inspired me to pick this painful effort back up. I always loved the idea of working on a real compiler but you really have to 'begin with the end in mind' to make it past the initial hurdles, I'm learning. :)

    I take the seeming coincidence of specifically you posting specifically about this as a kind of cosmic confirmation to press on. Even if I know it will take me light years to get anywhere close to anything that actually works. LOL!

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