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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

The distinction is massive, and why all those Bret Victor demos have nothing to do with Smalltalk. You can record a bit of your program's execution during development.

Anyways, this an active research topic...see:

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/211297/managedtime.pdf

If you haven't yet.

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Interesting, hadn't seen that (have to read it in more detail later). Does sort of remind me of the approach taken to synchronization/managing time for Croquet[1]: Tea time[2] (although the aim there had nothing to do with live programming). Seems like a different need for managing time, but a not entirely dissimilar approach.

[1] http://www.opencobalt.org/about/history

[2] I think the paper I read is this one -- but I can't verify it from here:

"Designing croquet's TeaTime: a real-time, temporal environment for active object cooperation", David P. Reed http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1094861

Thank you for the references. I've seen some of these before, but connecting the dots can be difficult (meaning, I have to keep going back to them later). A lot of seems to have gone into Kay's new project @ VRPI.

An earlier paper by Reed also seems relevant:

"Implementing atomic actions on decentralized data" http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=357355

Again, the goal here is not live programming, but the "boxing" of blocks of code into "atomic actions" feels very similar to the MS paper.

[edit: Some interesting parallels with the earlier story on Soundcloud's Roshi system too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732696 ]

Thanks, I'll take a look! Look like I'm going to make many changes for the camera copy.

Somewhat tangential (again thanks for the link, and the comments on "live programming"):

"In the Smalltalk model, for instance, state is persistent and code changes don't affect data. In the Clojure model, code is "mostly functional", with a small amount of carefully-managed state. Either model could be a starting point for a system where continuous code changes can be seen as continuous effects." -- Bret Victor http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

Right, but no one knows yet which will work (my hunch is a combination). My point was that the experiences he showed weren't Smalltalk experiences; we have finally got a lot of great ideas what to do post smalltalk.

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