Hacker News Reader

Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com