In-browser mini IDE and Programming Language | Hacker News Reader

In-browser mini IDE and Programming Language

algorithmatic.com

11 pointsANaimi21 comments

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What I see:

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Hello! To view this page you need Microsoft Silverlight 3 plug-in

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Sorry, fail.

I see a really neat IDE where you can even debug .

Not sure if the fail is on their side or yours.

HTML + javascript + asynchronous http request = open, interoperable web applications.

The fail is on their side.

1. On my Windows and Mac machines I refuse to install the Silverlight plug-in (I haven't found a site that legitimately needs it yet). 2. On my Ubuntu machine (where I generally read HN), there is no Silverlight plug-in (and Moonlight isn't advanced enough even if I wanted it). I'm not sure Chrome for Linux could deal with anything but the Flash plug-in yet anyway.

>1. On my Windows and Mac machines I refuse to install the Silverlight plug-in

Wow .. you refuse to install it because .. why ? It's MS ? it's a small plugin man get over it.

I constantly see this : ohhhh it's silverlight, nevermind what the application does - let's throw stones at it cause it's silverlight.

I refuse to install it because I haven't been convinced by people that I trust that there's anything that demands Silverlight. There's enough quality content that uses Flash that it's inescapable.

I'm not against installing Microsoft products on my system; I just upgraded the WMV codecs from Flip4Mac (now owned by Microsoft) last night. I've got Mac:Office. I'm just not interested in installing an inessential plug-in for something that I'm going to visit just once and probably never play with again.

You also didn't address the point that Silverlight just isn't cross-platform enough. Flash cross-platform support sucks (I can use it on Linux), but Silverlight cross-platform is nonexistent (as "Moonlight" is still essentially a Silverlight v1 implementation).

wow... sup with the hate? 10 upvotes? damn!, probably they used Silverlight to use IronPython or something like that...

I'm not sure why the homepage is search-enginey and I'm not sure why so many of the examples give syntax errors, but this is a very cool thing, or rather it has the potential to be very cool. I love the idea of generating simple GUIs for web apps from code. I also love the idea of being able to develop and use programs from within the browser. I would like to see this broken free from Silverlight (there's no reason it can't all be Javascript on the front end) and cleaned up some, but ultimately this is really freaking cool.

Many thanks. The errors were the result of me refactoring the parser's code last week. Just fixed it and deployed. This is what you get for not having appropriate unit-testing code coverage ;)

Requires Silverlight 3, eh?

How does it compare to: http://research.sun.com/projects/lively/

It's trying to do something totally different from what I can tell. It uses a limited form of interaction that works well with the web instead of trying to replicate the desktop on the web. It's also much more responsive. The dependency on Silverlight is somewhat disappointing, but this is really cool.

I'm actually working on something similar for a DSL used by my employer. We started with Javascript, but recently decided to port to Silverlight. I'm not entirely pleased with the decision, but within the context of the app, it makes sense--the DSL is used to generate screen flows on devices using WPF. By using Silverlight, we didn't have to define the existing WPF controls in Javascript in order to render the scripts from the IDE--we can just leverage (for the most part) the existing controls which are defined with XAML.

Personally, I don't particularly like developing via Silverlight--many of the tools required by VS2008 are buggy, and often there is precious little documentation as to how the tools work under the hood.

Is there any way to get to the algorithm view from the IDE?

Because um... I just want to play with it. I don't particularly care about the algorithms. I just like the tech.

Looks like javascript...smells like javascript - only without the cool stuff that javascript does. I guess the in-browser thing is kind of neat?

Seaside (Smalltalk web framework) provides something similar to this, where you can access the Smalltalk browser (i.e. IDE & Debugger) directly in the web browser. Whether or not you'd actually develop this way, is another question.

Unfortunately I cannot find a running example openly available on the web, probably because you could easily crash the server if you wanted to.

Someone once tried to explain to me why a browser-based IDE was a good idea, but he never managed to convince me. Could anyone here help me understand some reasons why we would want it, besides quick tests and demos?

Great, wonderful, um... what language is this?!

It's Algorithmatic! see http://www.algorithmatic.com/wiki/display/algorithmatic-refe...

You mean yet another company trying to get me to learn yet another language they created specifically for their product? I'll pass. :P

The text editor is a bit clunky. I use the home and end keys extensively while I program, so their lack of functionality really bothers me. The intelisense is cool, but when I press tab it does not complete the word.

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