Maybe starting a flame war, but isn’t this exactly what GNU Emacs & SLIME and for other languages, REPL, LSP/DAP protocols for? While I appreciate his/her effort (I appreciate everything related to developer’s ergonomics), I’m not sure what differentiates lighttable. Maybe I’m missing something? Can anyone explain?
The website definitely could use a little more info. I had never heard of lighttable until now. Figuring out what it was and what problems it was solving took longer than it should have, imo. I don't want to watch a video. Give me a breakdown, time is precious!
A co-worker uses it at work exclusively for editing markdown documents. I find that a little funny.
I had great optimism for LightTable, helped Kickstart it, but was disappointed with ultimately for the very reasons he outlined at the beginning of his talk: it couldn't shift me from emacs. It's not religious for me, but I could try and fail two or three times over in the time it took me to boot lighttable, figure out how to load my code, eval it and begin to debug it.
I enjoyed this presentation though. His Eve does strike me as a sort of proto-semantic web, although I'm warier of pouring my optimism into it this time though.
Lightrun looks really interesting. Have you personally used lightrun to debug anything directly in production? I saw the video on landing page and very curious to know how it works under the hood.
Cool. Yeah I use that and it's interesting how I didn't connect that to light table at all. Must be the bling, but yes, it's the same thing. I guess it's because, like you said, I usually do web dev in Java and don't really need it. In Javascript on the other hand, it would be very welcome (Firebug like stuff but then in IDE). Thanks for the insight. Light table is still an interesting experiment besides anything else.
Well, you can have bad things happen even more easily in Smalltalk, but enough of the library is well behaved that it's workable in development, especially since you can save the image periodically and you have a transactional log for even what you do after your last save.
To make Light Table work, you don't need 100% perfect semantics. You just need 99% good semantics, plus some way of turning off automatic refresh and refreshing manually.
Very interesting, so It's sort of a repl server. Using node.js you could even execute and return the results.. I'm starting to see how someone(who knows what they are doing) could create a POC LightTable plugin...
The light part means: it doesn't drag a huge framework and code and complexity you don't need with it. It uses less resources than it would if it was doing that.
I don't think Lighttalble is a visual programming environment. Last I looked it just had some visual enhancements, but the code is plain old text in files.
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