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Comment by Arelius | Hacker News Reader

What I worry about Light Table is what it won't be from Emacs. At the end of the day, Emacs is still a text editor, and still edits files. This means that I really can use it for anything, doesn't matter if I have a mode for it, or an embedded compiler/REPL. It still just works, and we can't forget this if we want a modern Emacs.

Emacs was born in a world of textfiles, Light Table shows us a post-textfile world, but before we can get to the future, it needs to be able to survive in the world we live in today, which is one where textfiles are king.

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"If you couple [DSTs] with the generalized editing capabilities I showed last time, you have what we believe to be the future of tools: an environment that you are able to mold to the exact shape of your problem."

I agree, we have no intention of removing general editing - you need it as much as anything else at this point.

I'm more deeply concerned about the fact that Emacs is something which, roughly speaking, I can control. Emacs is a community project. Your project appears to be commercial in nature, regardless of whether or not it's open source. Your project will also be a dictatorship by dint of the fact that it belongs to you.

Why should I trust you to provide the most fundamental tool in my work?

It will probably be under the GPL just like Emacs, so I'm not sure I understand the concern?

I think the fear is in the "probably". YCombinator, for instance, doesn't have a good record of doing things just for the community good, they are after all profit seeking.

That's not to say it won't happen, but the fear is there.

I'm fine with profit-seeking, but GNU projects like Emacs tend to be too fundamental to allow a proprietary solution to predominate. (Cf. gcc)

I'm fine paying for servers, for contractors, services, random productivity-ware like Pivotal Tracker etc. but I'm never going to be okay with subjecting my development environment, something I've honed for years and years, to fee extraction or proprietary control by a commercial entity.

He doesn't have to cater to you or me and I think it would be a mistake to do so. Visual Studio is very popular... When Light Table comes out, at the end of the day I'll still be using vim and I suspect most emacs users will still be using emacs. We're not the target audience. I disagree that Light Table needs to be anything like emacs to dominate, it can even have a proprietary license, it can skip over us just as Eclipse, VS, et al. have done. That's fine. I'd rather that be the case and see a pretty end-product that serves its original goals well (and I may even try it for fun if it's free) than having a half-baked "vim-mode" stuck on at the end just to try and attract me.

Visual Studio is a unique case in that it had the giant of Microsoft and their windows platform behind it, and IIRC, at the time no opensource free alternatives. I'm not sure in a modern world, Light Table advantages would afford it the same spread.

>He doesn't have to cater to you or me

You're right.

>I think it would be a mistake to do so.

Maybe.

>Visual Studio is very popular... When Light Table comes out

Does not follow. Visual Studio users will NOT be using Light Table even if they're aware of its existence (and they won't be, save for the few poor bastards working in Microsoft-land and reading HN).

Light Table, in terms of addressable market, is really only talking to grumpy hackers like me and startup people. Maybe particularly keen hobbyists who are good at following the state of the art.

> We're not the target audience.

Then why is his open source community (Clojure) and people he's reached mostly involve exactly our target audience?

>I'd rather that be the case and see a pretty end-product that serves its original goals well (and I may even try it for fun if it's free) than having a half-baked "vim-mode" stuck on at the end just to try and attract me.

That is...not what I was talking about. Did you even read what I said?

I was talking about freedom, not bolting it onto an existing editor. The point is that I don't want to Monsanto-ify my tools and be dependent on an unaccountable commercial entity for how I work.

What kind of business strategies would be compatible with that?

Also emacs provides an extensive platform with tons of modes to support pretty much anything you can throw at it, works in a terminal if needed, has an abstraction over files (buffers), debuggers, easy modes for vi/cua users, can connect to browser instance if needed and tons more.

Building a lighttable mode or even several small modes (libraries vs framework) for emacs would make more sense.

It is going to require a huge effort to duplicate a fraction of what it provides already.

But from a marketing point of view it is/was probably smarter to show eye candy to attract funding, but I am not sure it is the best route in the long run.

The advantage of LightTable's approach is that using HTML, is a simple, trivially extensible and powerful way to provide advanced UI widgeting, something modern emacs supports very poorly. Mostly due to working in a terminal if needed, but I think it holds it back a bit. The closest thing we have in emacs is pixmap support, which is poor, and painful to use!

Though, is LightTable the best/easiest way to get that? I don't know, it may be easier to render emacs buffers into a webkit view, it may also not be.

> Though, is LightTable the best/easiest way to get that? I don't know, it may be easier to render emacs buffers into a webkit view, it may also not be.

That is what I meant with "connect to browser instances" (swank-js already allows that, among others). Basically when you need more advanced rendering, or browser environment when it is your target (browser based games and whatnot), this could be good enough and you can leverage a huge ecosystem for all the rest.

Sure, it could be good enough, but the ecosystem has not been building up around that. Perhaps it's the seperate languages used, or the clunkiness of having to use another browser and all the setup just to render a simple graph. But I personally have not found an extension that takes advantage of that.

It's the versatility of emacs that keeps me coming back. I need to use R for this project? Python? C? Well, at least I can use it through the comforting interface of emacs.

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