What is “immediate connection” good for? | Hacker News Reader

What is “immediate connection” good for?

lacezero.wordpress.com

6 pointsiamwil7 comments

There are two programming language environments, or better to say operating systems, that are designed for this kind of immediate coding: Forth and Smalltalk. Forth plays its strength when controlling hardware. Your code is immediate executed, and you see the results, e.g. a robot arm moving instantly. Times of Forth coders running circles around teams using traditional programming languages are nearly over.

Smalltalk on the other hand still has to find its killer application. Smalltalk was 35 years to early, and since then every few month a new language is hyped, each one one step closer to Smalltalk. Computing history turns in cycles and we soon will have a situation comparable to VM/370, where every application is running its own operating system. I hope that there will be a Smalltalk killer application exploiting the immediate changes in coding to power users, similar as Forth controllers do, but on GUI level.

Swift playgrounds.

I never played with Swift, as its an Apple gimmick. I only read the wikipedia article right now, claiming its a compiled language. Are you able to inspect variables in a running systems, are you able to change the running code without restarting the system?

A few other examples come into mind, where immediate coding is of benefit.

First we have all those educational toy languages in the tradition of Logo, that are designed for children to learn the first steps in coding, that benefit for immediate execution.

Next we have the tools, that are often not considered as real programming environments, e.g. table calculation in Visi calc tration, and tools like matlab, mapple, maxima, axiom, or R.

One example is algorithms heavy code. There are already numerous resources(e.g [1]) that visualize algorithms and data structures. If those kinds of animations could be generated on the fly, it would be much easier to write that kind of code.

Being able to visualize code blocks (kind of like Light Table) and move them around between files, maybe even modify inheritance structures graphically could be useful too.

Seems like there are a lot of cool things you could do, but IMO the challenge is coming up with a few things that are actually useful for a significant amount of code and yet remain possible to build.

[1] http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~stevenha/visualization/

Quote: "To sum up his talk here, he talks about inventing on principal–something you believe in."

Actually, I'm pretty sure he recommends investing on principle.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/principle

Quote: "a moral rule or belief that helps you know what is right and wrong and that influences your actions"

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/principal

Quote: "most important, consequential, or influential : chief <the principal ingredient> <the region's principal city>"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law

We are trying this for our prototyping tool in the most straightforward way:

- Evaluate and update result on typing

- Inline show errors on typing

http://framerjs.com

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