Bret Victor used to work in R&D at Apple, so that probably isn't a coincidence
That. Was. Awesome. Totally Bret Victor type of stuff. I was just meaning to play with Light Table but as an iOS developer.. oh my god.
Checkout Scala worksheets (Eclipse and IDEA) and LightTable too.
Yeah.. Because Scala doesn't have a metric ton of problems. AVOID!
Scala doesn't have a metric ton of problems. It has some problems, sure, but it has a lot of nice features as well.
Plus 'metric' must only accompany 'shitload' or other potty-mouthed quantifiers. Troll fail
Basically, he just came up with something using FP that was more demo-able than somewhat hacky things people were already doing in other languages/environments. (For which, he deserves tons of credit.)
Bret victor's demos really have nothing to do with FP. The textual code demos in his learnable programming essay are all JavaScript and fairly imperative.
As were a lot of the things you could do years earlier in Smalltalk. FP with referential transparency makes it a whole lot easier and slicker. (Can also do it with data flow analysis.)
By 'FP' here you guys mean 'functional programming?'
Yes
Or Scala worksheets in Eclipse, or any Lisp implementation.
First thing I thought. I wonder if Bret had any input into this? Very happy to see his ideas in a production environment anyway.
Unsurprisingly, I looked at the screenshot, came back to this comments page and ctrl+f'd for "Bret".