Light Table a year ago | Hacker News Reader

Light Table a year ago

chris-granger.com

142 pointsibdknox34 comments

The HN community has been especially supportive. Thanks guys - I hope you'll stick with us. There's a lot of awesome stuff coming.

I really hope you see this -> Please please create a 10 min screencast showing how to use light table. May be I'm being utterly dumb and can't find this anywhere, but I've looked for a simple tutorial for Light Table and have not found it. I've downloaded Light Table and haven't figured out how to use it. I actually use Lein for clojurescript development because I could find enough documentation on it to get it running, while I am assuming Light Table is supposed to be much easier to use.

I support this idea; but I think said cast should be made when light table is more consumer-ready persay. Perhaps when the dev is satisfied with it being a sublime-text legitimate rival.

Thank you for building this. I'm learning Clojure right now, and it is my first foray into functional programming (outside of using map type functions in Python, JS, etc).

1) Light Table makes Clojure's (and really Lisp's) beauty jump out at me.

2) It is a true pleasure to use the InstaRepl, and I'm looking forward to doing more with it as I learn to apply Clojure's basics to doing stuff in my day to day job.

I frickin love this thing.

One aspect of Light Table that I find really cool, that I haven't seen discussed, is its utility to people who are just learning to program.

I think its (current, anyhow) relative simplicity and instant feedback make it a really amazing tool for education. I think the difficulty and foreignness of setting up your stack is one of the things that makes programming seem foreign and difficult to people, but Light Table makes it look cool and easy.

Or maybe it doesn't, I can't tell. I've been doing this too long, I think. But I'd love to see someone in a position to try Light Table for educational purposes do so and report back.

We're working on this ourselves. With the next release we're doing a full set of docs and we're making a number of things on the setup side easier.

Robert and I really want to see people using LT to learn programming and I think we have some very compelling things to offer there. :) Robert is going to be making some rounds once 0.4.0 is out to see what we need to do to get folks like Hackbright Academy and dev bootcamp and all the others around here using it.

It'd almost be worth it to build in an evaluator for Scheme, just for SICP. Maybe someone will be able to do that as a plugin when the beta is released.

it probably wouldn't even be that hard, actually - since you could model it pretty closely off of the Clojure one. Either way, though, it's definitely something that the plugin system will enable :)

Awesome to hear. My secret hope is that a Lisp, possibly Clojure, can become a dominant teaching language, and then perhaps a popular industry one as well. Then there will be more Lisp work out there, which I think would be rad for programming in general.

My school teaches Racket (http://racket-lang.org/), and I know a lot of other schools do as well.

From what I've heard from the PLT people, they are definitely interested in bringing these experiences to Racket; hopefully experience with LightTable will provide some insight in how to do that.

By Racket here do you mean DrRacket?

DrRacket is an IDE for the Racket language. I never really understood why it stopped being DrScheme, or why Racket looks a LOT like Scheme. Then I read this http://racket-lang.org/new-name.html

Yeah, I was asking if the experience he was talking about was an editing one.

I'm planning to develop a scientific programming class (likely focused on Python), and I'd love to make use of something like LightTable to make assignment, loops, and functions less opaque to first-time programmers. I think that this kind of UI has tremendous potential for exactly that application, among many others.

Hey Chris,

I love the idea of Light Table.

I'm sorry if I missed a post, but when do you plan on officially releasing the source code to the public? I'd really like to play with it.

I don't have an exact date, but it will happen once the beta goes public and the plugin architecture is available :)

I really like this product and hope other IDEs can take some lessons from it. I've read a few of your posts and I remember you mentioning that you use Node.js. Is there a page that talks more about the technologies used to build Light Table?

Chris,

As a donator in the Light Table Kickstarter, I'm surprised that its already been a year. You've done some great work on this, I'm currently using Light Table right now to do some light JS work. Keep it up!

I'm interested in ClojureScript development. Will LightTable support it out of the box just like it supports Clojure?

it already does :) It's a little harder than it should be right now, though. Basically the steps are:

1) Open your html file

2) run the `connect to browser command` and copy the script tag

3) insert script tag into your html file

4) bring up your page in the browser (it has to have the output of lein-cljsbuild on it to get the initial cljs dependencies and such)

5) open a cljs file

6) eval an expression with cmd/ctrl+enter

7) select the browser instead of LightTable-UI

This process will be getting much simpler in the next release. :)

Will this mark the release of the source code?

"As such, I believe it only fair that the core of Light Table be open sourced once it is launched."

Oh man. As someone just getting started with Clojure and ClojureScript. I am super excited to work with LightTable (looks like I need to update my IOS though :p) And super excited about it being open sourced. Not sure if this is mentioned anywhere, but what is light table written in?

Almost entirely ClojureScript: http://www.chris-granger.com/2013/01/24/the-ide-as-data/

Exciting! Thanks.

Hey Chris, it's wonderful seeing the innovation and awesomeness that Light Table is bringing to the scene.

I'm very impressed with what I've seen from this project, and I'm truly sorry I missed it's Kickstarter. However, I'd still like to contribute; is there a way to still donate? Folding money into paper airplanes and throwing it in your direction doesn't seem like it would be effective.

I see the alpha is available.

Can I find a how-to-use video or blog post somewhere?

not that is matters, but will say this again: how about making http://www.lighttable.com/ readable/usable on something else than 1280px+ screens in a room with optimally tweaked ambiental lighting! Lots of peoples read websites on cheap Android tablets, outside, in full sunlight, you know! (The same used to apply to chris-granger.com and thankfully it's been fixed, but the design-mantra for the whole Lighttable project still seems to be "ugly grays, bad contrast and flat-everything to the point of annoying your eyes out"!)

Somebody is currently implementing something similar in Emacs for Emacs Lisp: https://github.com/Fuco1/litable

FYI, unreadable on a galaxy nexus.

What an amazing project that you have. I am blown away watched the video and installed it right away

When does Ruby gets supported?

I'd like to know when we can expect a documented language plugin API.

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