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Comment by frio | Hacker News Reader

Good luck, and stay strong. I think the demo you created was incredibly impressive, and I suspect a lot of people will therefore expect a lot from this product. This is going to sound overly pessimistic, so please forgive me - but I suspect that, as time goes on - and it will, because to me the goals of this project seem huge, and the problems you're attempting to solve seem hard - you'll probably cop a bit of backlash over the time taken, not living up to expectations, etc.

I hope that if that happens, you're able to ignore it and keep working on it anyway. Regardless of whether you accomplish your goals or not, I'll happily be throwing some money into the kickstarter and crossing my fingers for you guys, because the actual idea behind this is awesome.

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Thanks I appreciate the support and it's a good reminder :)

I completely agree with you. There's always good and bad to presenting something like this. On the good side it gets people dreaming - it leaves enough to the imagination for it to seem amazing, for the possibilities to be endless. But unfortunately those things cannot map perfectly to reality, at least not all of them. Having worked on VS, I definitely know I can't build an IDE over night, not by myself, not even with 100's of people. And for some that will take the magic out of it initially. The way to combat that, though, is through transparency I think. I will be very open as the project goes on. I want people to know what we're thinking, what we're working on, and why we're doing it. My hope is that we can sustain a dialog as time goes on about how we as a community of creators go about creating things.

Despite the realities though, I will do my absolute best to deliver some of that magic. :)

I wish you the best of luck.

With that said, most of these ideas have been in one demo or another for quite a while. As soon as you leave toy problems behind and try to visualize loops, objects, and deep recursion it's next to impossible to visualize flow and your back to inspecting breakpoints. But, if you want something you could probably implement and get people to use I would suggest something like XSL-FO. It's a pure functional language so you don't need to worry about loops, objects, or changing state just deep recursion. Unlike Lisp, C#, or even Java there is no great IDE's out there and your rarely dealing with multi megabyte's of code. You can even start with XPath, XSL-FO, and then try and get a more complex functional language working.

I wish the best luck; What about creating an emacs plugin initially?

Transparency is a great idea. May I suggest starting off by releasing your intended feature list for the product? That way, with each release, you can cross things off the feature list, and people can see that you're making progress.

Going to disagree that this is a good idea. One of the worst things you can do is release a product "road map." It makes expectations way too specific, and will put you in the position where if you need to alter or change that roadmap you are going to get pre-emptive backlash for work you have not even done yet.

Yeah I don't think I'll release that either, this is far too uncertain of a territory. Instead, I'd rather be much more present focused.

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