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Comment by zacharyvoase | Hacker News Reader

I find this 'critique' (it's not a critique, it's a takedown) to run against the spirit of Hacker News.

Someone built a concept showing how the experience of writing code, for their corner of the software ecosystem, could be improved. They found popular support, and they're now setting about to make that concept happen. Congratulations; this is what Hacker News is supposed to be all about.

And here's someone summarily piecing apart and nitpicking on that concept (and the details of the demo video) for no apparent reason—there's no feedback or suggestions for improvement, it's just saying "well Eclipse does this and this and this already". I'm not impressed.

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one reason is probably that he is the developer of a "DVR for Java" that "Record entire execution of your Java app" and allows you to "Play it back on any machine".

That and the clear lack of experience with anything different than Java is clearly heavily influencing his perspective.

And I think there is no malice, it's just biased without realising it

I smell 'ad hominem'

not really, just that all of us come with a point of view and I think his is made clear by the work he is doing on that project.

Never used it, looks interesting and useful for Java. That's where I think the problem is: if you have used only one tool you tend to see everything from that perspective.

His argument is on how most concepts in light table are not novel. Branding light table as novel or groundbreaking is therefor incorrect and his post is called for.

You seem to attack his argument on his background as a Java developer and not on parts of his argument. As far as I know, this is called an ad hominem attack and in my opinion does not belong on Hacker News.

If you can find good counter arguments on his arguments:

- Light Table is not novel or groundbreaking since Eclipse has had these kind of features for at least a decade (and several Smalltalk IDE's have had them for several decades), - Light Table's examples are contrived because real world examples do not behave in this way,

we'd be having a real discussion.

first: I replied to zacharyvoase's comment and therefore my comment was related to his, don't take it in isolation.

There are plenty of other comments here that explain why pdeva1 is coming from the wrong angle therefore I'm not going to repeat them.

Chris never mentioned novel or groundbreaking, others have so go and ask them but please before you do that look up the difference between invention and innovation and also remember that novel really means fresh or refreshing (although it's used most of the time to indicate new)

As far as I can see, you're arguing:

"Since he's a Java developer, he delivers critique on LightTable".

thereby pointing out that any other kind of developer would probably not have made such critique, thereby relating the validity of his critique with him being a Java developer/Eclipse user, thereby being an ad hominem attack.

On your last argument I would like to add that on Hacker News it is clearly branded as the next big thing since sliced bread.

Of course languages such a Clojure, Scala and Haskell need more sophisticated IDE's than vim + plugins. Especially for larger projects. And as such I think the features in the POC are a good idea. Still, they are nothing new and I'd expect them in any modern IDE. I could add some idea's of my own (stealing from an IDE I use daily):

- annotate the source with a git history - highlighting based on AST instead of regex's - outlines

Anyways, we agree that Light Table is not novel, nor groundbreaking and it's not an invention. Exactly the point Prashant Deva was trying to make. Nothing to see here, move along.

"Since he's a Java developer, he delivers critique on LightTable".

No, it's more that he's writing as if he's unaware how parochially Java-centric his viewpoint is. Many of his points aren't very useful for other languages.

Ah, finally, here we have the gist of the argument: "Many of his points aren't very useful for other languages." The rest is all noise and no signal.

Well, although that point has been answered on other parts of the forum, it seems the auto-eval function is reserved for immutables only and non-recursive languages. So it seems this restriction reduces to number of applicable language to around zero. Thus, at least one of his points applies to all other languages. Do you want to hear argumentation for the other points?

So it seems this restriction reduces to number of applicable language to around zero. Thus, at least one of his points applies to all other languages. Do you want to hear argumentation for the other points?

It seems we've touched a nerve, which is a bit embarrassing. Clearly, the kinds of things the Light-Table gentleman is talking about are applicable to more than zero languages. I know because I've spent 1.5 decades coding in one. That you'd make such an argument indicates you aren't in command of all the facts, or you're willing to take or build up strawman interpretations.

(One famous gentleman once said, "If you ever get someone upset, you've struck gold!")

That said, "auto-eval," if this means automatic re-evaluation of everything is slick demo stuff. But nimbly being able to edit and save any source code, then being able to fearlessly rewind the stack to an appropriate point and go on as if the change was always there would be appropriate even for very involved and long running code, and is quite real.

Similarly, I know for a fact that everything else in the Light Table video has approximations in real environments.

How would you render trees or (big) matrices? Recursive functions? Infinite lists?

I'm upset because the method of discussion here seems to revolve around tainting the credulity of the author ("That you'd make such an argument indicates you aren't in command of all the facts"); by claiming a conflict of interest while this is not applicable (the OP does not claim authority!); or by appeals to authority ("because I've spent 1.5 decades coding in one").

By the way, I feel that those who have to play the "If you ever get someone upset, you've struck gold!"-card, should listen to some more gentlemen talk about syllogisms.

How would you render trees or (big) matrices? Recursive functions? Infinite lists?

You don't. I think the Light Table author is naive here. Instead, you let the programmer rewind the stack at will.

I'm upset because the method of discussion here seems to revolve around tainting the credulity of the author ("That you'd make such an argument indicates you aren't in command of all the facts")

The facts in question have to do with things I've seen implemented. Your argument is an indication you aren't aware of the same. That's not tainting your credulity. I'm questioning if you have all the facts.

By the way, I feel that those who have to play the "If you ever get someone upset, you've struck gold!"-card, should listen to some more gentlemen talk about syllogisms.

You are the one who is upset. You are also incorrect about what you purport to be upset about. (My intentions in pointing out certain facts and their implications.) Please process this data.

Ad hominem aren't always a logical fallacies, and, in this case, might not bet at all. Ad Personam are.

You should read Eristic Dialectics: The Art Of Being Right by Arthur Schopenhauer.

Saying he is biased because he is a java-only programmer isn't clearly a wrong statement, and it doesn't mean he's totally wrong either.

Just saying, but that's not the point of the article.

Thanks for the reference, I'll surely read it. [Pause] I've just read the first couple of chapters and it is most surely an enjoyable read. It brings the current discussion into a completely different light. Thanks again.

I'd say that instant eval in the 'inventing on principle' fashion does make it novel and groundbreaking. Everything in it don't have to be. The core premise, a general purpose IDE based around those ideas is.

I don't even see it as a critique, it's more of a "I use Eclipse and I like Eclipse because it is tailored to my needs as a Java developer" article.

Exactly... though it really underscored the idea that the tools we use (and the tools that go with those tools) can shape our worldview.

What would have happened if the author took those objections and turned them around, asking instead, what sort of language would need to exist to work ideally with a tool like light table? And, possibly, what sort of problems could more easily be solved if we adapted our language/development model to work with an environment like light table?

There may well be no amazing breakthrough here, just as the OP seems to argue, but it certainly seems as though it could (or should) function as an opportunity to rethink our tools and development methods a bit...

edit: Also, to the claim that many of the features of light table have been implemented elsewhere already, I'd point out that rarely are good ideas purely new, but successful advances come from sticking many little bits of innovation together in a powerful way

I'd agree.

As with all things in life, sometimes even the best of us get into arguments. From semi-colons to jumping the shark because your app is published on multiple platforms, geeks have been known to have their fair share of silly rants. And this article represents one of them.

Let's ignore the obvious confirmation bias of the author with their Eclipse background and ask ourselves the pertinent question: even if the author is correct, so what?

With open choices, we can choose to use any IDE we feel like. Some, like myself, feel that Eclipse is too cluttered and would prefer a visually streamlined system. Why then devolve yourself into putting down the work of others because you don't like it?

There's an absolute difference between a review and the way the author propositioned and explained his rationale as to why Light Table was not for him, explained by the reactions here in HN.

Let's be critical, rather than criticise.

yes! So this. I agree; Let's see some constructive criticism and ideas for how to improve the LightTable idea, instead of just trying to shoot it down as 'not novel'.

Parenthetically, I get rather irritated with people who like to criticize everything as "not novel." Depending on how you look at it almost nothing is completely "novel" ("nothing new under the sun" and all that).

What is important is the execution and new wrinkles in the CURRENT iteration - NOT whether something vaguely or even pretty similar was attempted or proposed at some point in the past.

There is a valid point lurking in there.

The instant evaluation model doesn't play nicely with side-effects. Exactly where side-effects occur can be difficult to determine, there's no simple way to work around this.

This is less of a problem in Clojure, thanks to its immutable data structures, but they're not a panacea. I'm also not sure how well this would work in JS and Python, the other languages that Light Table intends to initially target.

One possible solution is to have hooks into side-effects: you could display console output or logging alongside the instant evaluation. The real difficulty is network communication: even if you're okay with actually sending requests over the wire, there's an awkward balance between visibility and generality. Something like libpcap [1] is very general, but gives minimal insight into the content. Hooking into a particular HTTP client library gives you a lot more visibility into what's going on, but you'll need to do this every time you want to use a new library.

[1] http://www.tcpdump.org/

you could mitigate side-effects by running all of lighttable in a VM, assuming no files and creating all the ones you need. Network requests could be intercepted. The key to make this workable would be sensible defaults, allowing you to just open it up and start a new project instantly, and allowing custimization for complicated projects.

All you need is a VM, a good standard library with mostly functions with minimal side deffects, a way to save all runtime state, and a way to log every change and replay them in case of a crash.

The side-effect could also just be updating a mutable hash-map, which has much of the same issues, and isn't something that you can sandbox.

In Smalltalk, this isn't a problem. Our Dictionary instances are mutable. Usually, we realize it while continuing the debugging/editing (they happen at the same time) and we either rewind the stack a little further to get a new instance of the dictionary, or we can easily undo the side effect. It usually happens in less than the amount of time you took to read the previous sentence.

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