Light Table (Kodowa) is hiring | Hacker News Reader

Light Table (Kodowa) is hiring

kodowa.com

67 pointsibdknox23 comments

The idea of a reactive IDE just seemed so interesting that I downloaded Light Table last week even though I don't know Clojure. It's wonderful. I've started reading up on Clojure, which turns out to be wonderful too. And then I discovered Noir! How did I not know about this stuff before?

Same. I've been playing around with Light Table for about a month now, and I'm completely hooked on Clojure.

"Tell us a time you hacked a non-computer system to your advantage."

Sounded like YC application?

Tastefully borrowed from it :). It happens to be a pretty darn good question - it's a good place to talk about an accomplishment, and provides some insight into the intelligence, creativity, and personality of the person who answers it.

And this is why I prefer this kind of job posts: it sets up a 2 way communication. Like HN job posts used to be back in the day.

What are examples of this? Working around social systems? ie, as an example, the white South African student that applied for a bursary for African Americans in America?

If I were to apply, I'd use my senior year in high school (oh, so long ago). I registered for 7 college-level courses that I knew were all going to be taught during the same 2 blocks of time. That meant that I only had to "go to class" for two hours a day, and could spend the rest of my time doing whatever I wanted so long as I kept up with the material on my own time and agreed that my performance on the AP exams would be my entire grade. My result was a year of college credit, better grades than I'd ever gotten before and maybe a third of the workload of those in class.

If you didn't have to attend the classes in person, why did it matter that they were taught during the same 2 blocks of time?

I was supposed to. In my high school, it was very much the case that you'd go to class if you were enrolled. However, it was also very much not expected that someone would take the cross-section of courses I took, so scheduling didn't take that into account. The registrar was faced with the choice to either tell a star student to take "dumber" classes or to let me take courses on my own terms and check their scheduling more carefully in the future.

I wonder since a while what makes Light Table definitely better than emacs?

edit: better or different.

It embraces this concept: http://vimeo.com/36579366

Hey thanx, it's a nice talk for sure :)

Not based on a 30 year old codebase designed in and for an era before color displays, mice, touchpads, graphics and unicode?

Not using a god awful Lisp dialect (Emacs Lisp) at it's base?

Having more thought, design, and hindsight poured into the UI than the pile of hacks and over the year additions that drive Emacs?

Having things more integrated than independent elisp plugins that hardly know each other and don't really collaborate?

Rethinking the keyboard shortcut design?

Just a few clarifications here...

> Not based on a 30 year old codebase designed in and for an era before color displays, mice, touchpads, graphics and unicode?

* That codebase also runs on: variety of UNIX/Linux distros and their terminal emulators; MS-DOS; Windows; etc.

* Emacs supports mice: both scrolling; clickable hyperlinks; drag regions; buttons and other widgets.

> Not using a god awful Lisp dialect (Emacs Lisp) at it's base?

* Touchpads? Do you mean tablets or laptop touchpads? That's a HID device and works the same as a mouse does...

* Graphics? Yes, Emacs supports graphics and can indeed render PDFs/LaTeX documents using external programs; native image support is usually compiled into Emacs.

* Unicode? Emacs has more complete unicode support than you'll find in any other editor out there. What editor let's you open up a subprocess to a commandline tool and have it set such that stdin is treated as UTF-8, but stdout is Cyrillic?

> Having more thought, design, and hindsight poured into the UI than the pile of hacks and over the year additions that drive Emacs?

* Emacs-Lisp isn't great, but Emacs and elisp is the closest most people will ever get to the spirit of a Lisp Machine. Elisp isn't perfect, but for many it gets the job done. It is also incredibly flexible and its "naff" implementation with dynamic scoping improves the spirit of hacking in Emacs by encouraging people to hook, tweak and inject into Emacs's core. > Having more thought, design, and hindsight poured into the UI than the pile of hacks and over the year additions that drive Emacs? > Having things more integrated than independent elisp plugins that hardly know each other and don't really collaborate?

* Design could be a lot better, but that's what happens when you support the same product for a long long period of time. I know Emacs/Vim will be around in 10 years; will Light Table? Will TextMate?

* Most plugins do integrate quite well actually into major modes (the programming modes) such as: Eldoc mode, find-function mode, TAGS support, Imenu, etc. -- it's not perfect, but then again: nothing is?

> Rethinking the keyboard shortcut design?

* That's just blasphemy. You should observe an experience Emacs guy using Emacs and I think you'll find they're more than capable of accomplishing what they want in few keystrokes. It's different from Vim, yes, but then Emacs isn't really modal.

>> Not using a god awful Lisp dialect (Emacs Lisp) at it's base?

> snip

You answered to this one as if it was based on the previous line. I don't think it was. As a language, Emacs lisp is crappy and arcane, even compared to lisps that were there before it.

> Touchpads? Do you mean tablets or laptop touchpads? That's a HID device and works the same as a mouse does...

No, it really doesn't. And if you try to treat it like a mouse, you get crappy UX. I don't really like Apple, but that is one of the things they got right much earlier than other people.

It's different from a mouse, but the basics should work reasonably well; at least, they did when I used to own a laptop which was admittedly a while ago.

>That codebase also runs on: variety of UNIX/Linux distros and their terminal emulators; MS-DOS; Windows; etc.

So what? Those can still run Emacs. Progress in programming editors should not stop because they new one might not run on MS-DOS or some obscure platform. If people want it there it might get ported eventually anyway.

>Emacs supports mice: both scrolling; clickable hyperlinks; drag regions; buttons and other widgets.

I know it does, I use it from time to time. Heck, even Vim does. What I wrote is that it wasn't _designed_ for those things -- they are an afterthought.

>Touchpads? Do you mean tablets or laptop touchpads? That's a HID device and works the same as a mouse does...

No it doesn't. 2012 trackpads also feature multitouch gestures.

>Graphics? Yes, Emacs supports graphics and can indeed render PDFs/LaTeX documents using external programs; native image support is usually compiled into Emacs.

Yes, badly. Again, it wasn't designed from the start to do so, most of the additions are badly implemented. The rendering, for one, is a joke.

>Emacs-Lisp isn't great, but Emacs and elisp is the closest most people will ever get to the spirit of a Lisp Machine

Not if someone comes up with something better that Emacs.

(Or even better, not if someone comes up with something even better than the early eighties Lisp Machine design).

>Design could be a lot better, but that's what happens when you support the same product for a long long period of time. I know Emacs/Vim will be around in 10 years; will Light Table?

Only one way to find out: let's build it, use it, wait and see.

I'm sure that Eclipse, for example, will be around in 10 years too. And it started 20 years after Emacs.

>That's just blasphemy. You should observe an experience Emacs guy using Emacs and I think you'll find they're more than capable of accomplishing what they want in few keystrokes.

Any scientific control group and alternative A/B/A tests that show that Emacs's are the optimal keyboard shortcuts? If not, then I propose we continue investigating the matter, blapshemy or not.

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