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"Of course ..." is that really true though? From the very beginning, the very first demo, Chris Granger mentions that he got inspired by Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle demo. He mentions it in the first blog post as well :p No mentions of smalltalk

Chris Granger's first video on LightTable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XUWpze_A_s Chris Granger's first blog post on LightTable: http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/04/12/light-table-a-new-id...

⬐ fedess

Hm... I seem to remember him saying something about it, but (of course!) i might be wrong.

⬐ e12e

Ah, but Bet Victor draws inspiration from Smalltalk, Logo and Hypercard :

http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

Hmm. I work with Eclipse a lot, but this is not just visual. Maybe I use something different but the way of organizing your methods on screen and the actual live coding I don't have in Eclipse. We're not talking 'debug' here; we're talking live coding. Did you check videos like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XUWpze_A_s If you can do that with Eclipse & Android, please tell me how because then I have been stupid (which is very possible: I haven't changed my toolchain in a while).

⬐ mattmanser

http://www.twitch.tv/notch/b/314380336

That's the first video I found on that stream. Note that it's about 50 seconds in that he starts actually editing the code; he edits the slide friction before going up the slope. There's a better one of notch designing a dungeon game for some competition where he's writing the rendering code and it's changing as he does it.

That's eclipse right?

You can do the same in visual studio as well, just need to have 'edit and continue' enabled. It's one of these magic things that you either know about or don't, but generally if you're a web developer you'll never have needed it.

I'm not sure what you mean by We're not talking 'debug' here; as technically that's in debug mode when it's running at the same time as coding.

Functionally it seems no different to me. Notice how the 'draw player' function in the clojure example actually contains the variable for color, it's not a pre-initialized variable. I wonder whether storing and changing that elsewhere would have resulted in a colour change (logically I would guess no otherwise the game state would contantly reset).

⬐ tluyben2

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.

⬐ mattmanser

I like light table and all that, seems a good idea as IDEs are too heavy but for me:

1. I don't need the docs all the time as I've already got that given I use a statically typed language 80% of the time and IDEs actually already do that

2. Most of that other stuff is already available in Eclipse and Visual Studio

So for me it's mostly shrugs what are you all so impressed by?

I like interactive, but it seems to work well only if you can simulate the commandline well enough in the browser (like Codecademy does). If you do anything advanced, it has to be done really well. These are couple of good examples:

http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XUWpze_A_s

I also made a ClojureScript version of Bret Victor's interactive editor applied to game development:

http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/02/26/connecting-to-your-c...

Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XUWpze_A_s&context=C4f8c...