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Comment by asgard1024 | Hacker News Reader

I am not a big fan of "immediate feedback" in coding (such as instant compilation). I find it distracting.

What I think I would appreciate more than "live" values of variables etc. would be integration of some statistics into IDE. For example, how often was this function called? What is the usual value of this parameter? What is the mean/modus value? What are the outliers? How often was this condition true? And so on.

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The immediate feedback is useless by itself (according to the essay); what is useful is the ability to debug in real time.

What you want is some more advanced logging facility, which is completely possible (e.g. Graphs over time in playground); I don't think logging should be limited to just lines of text (an intern is working on log-driven relation graphs).

I am not sure how is that going to scale for bigger programs. In simple cases, I can model behavior of the program in my head, in more complicated cases, without aggregation, there will be too much data to make sense of it anyway. I think the aggregation of the statistical data is the crucial thing here.

Anyway, good that someone is playing with this.

The point of the abstractions presented in the essay is that they are under the programmer's control (write code to debug code isn't that new), so they only see as much as they want to. This is in contrast to automatic methods that show everything and are too noisy.

Scaling will perhaps come with time, by which I mean managed time. It is a nice goal for next gen languages.

What do you think of the work that Philip Guo [0] is doing? Specifically the youtube video.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8002839

Philip has more of an educational focus, so more is shown to help then understand what is going on (also, see Bret Victor's Learnable Programming Essay). The work presented in this essay deals with enhancing the debugging experience for programmers who are already trained up.

What I think I would appreciate more than "live" values of variables etc. would be integration of some statistics into IDE. For example, how often was this function called?

Check out Theseus from MIT / Adobe Research: http://blogs.adobe.com/open/behind-the-scenes-with-theseus-a...

Totally agree with you. What I would add to that list: A visualization of the memory space; ie. how often do objects get accessed, how much memory do they each require and how long do they reside in memory on average.

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