
Light Table reaches 300k necessary for Python support - michael_fine
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table?ref=live
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blitzprog
The bp editor has similar features (code bubbles), though dynamic evaluation
and code bubble workspaces are still in development. And I'm pretty sure it
won't cost me 300k to finish it. <http://blitzprog.org/>

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rastapanda
That website is awful.

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blitzprog
Alright, what do you want me to fix then?

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ericb
Not the op, but some considerations:

The screenshot isn't readable, feels odd tacked on at the bottom, and if you
click it, you don't get an enlarged version. This is a language, not an
editor, right? That's what the title says. But where is the hello world? Where
is the list of snippets to give you a feel for the language?

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blitzprog
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll try to work on it. Both the language and the
editor are currently in development (it's just an alpha version) but as a user
you need to use the editor due to technical reasons (syntaxless). Of course
you could write your own editor and just use bp as a standalone compiler but
that would mean you need to develop an editor that can produce the generic XML
output. I'm pretty sure nobody wants to do this so I'm working on a default
IDE to make it more user-friendly.

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dsirijus
I still can't believe people are paying this much attention to a glorified
text editor.

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archangel_one
As programmers, we spend most of our working time in glorified text editors
(I'm using mostly Emacs at the moment, which that is certainly an apt
description of). I guess it's natural to be excited about new alternatives for
our primary tool.

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slurgfest
Light table is a neat concept but there is a lot more to an efficient text
editor than that one concept...

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nickik
Psst, dont tell anybody, they are asking for money because they know a concept
is not enougth and the need money to implment what you call 'a lot more'.

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slurgfest
Good, so you understand that most of the problem is not this one concept. How
does the one concept justify reinventing the wheel? There are several very
good editors and IDEs. What is wrong with them?

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batista
They are just glorified text editors is what is wrong with them (to re-use
your initial argument).

This concept/potential implementation has more syntactic intelligence.

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gaius
I would love to run Light Table on a Surface
<http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/default.aspx> Feature request! :-)

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swah
As if money would magically make hard things happen :)

Seriously, what if Python is specially hard to support for some reason? I feel
if it was in the easy-to-medium-hard space, there would be a Slime port to
Python, and if there isn't, its because its probably hard...

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exDM69
> Seriously, what if Python is specially hard to support for some reason?

Many of the cool features in LightTable are already supported by fancy python
interpreters like iPython and bPython.

LightTable must either implement a Python parser and a partial
interpreter/evaluator that is used to analyze call graphs and such or use the
relevant parts from the Python core. Not a simple task to implement (and
maintain) but most definitely doable.

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sirclueless
What call graphs? Everything in python is call-by-name. `globals()['foo']`
isn't exactly a very strong reference, and anyone can change it.

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seunosewa
In practice, those things are hardly changed. When they are, users understand
that the IDE might not be able to help them,

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slurgfest
Yep, that kind of thing is pretty strongly discouraged anyway and as a Python
programmer I definitely have never expected (say) lint tools to understand
them. Life goes on, it's just not that important for getting things done.

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addisaden
Would be great, when they got android support (for tablet). And with an
Bluetooth keyboard you could rock also a lot. I don't know how complicated
this is, because of the dalvikJvm engine.

But this IDE is amazing, really nice. Would be great to get also Rubysupport
(with plugins you can Rock this also i think).

Does anybody know if they are working with flash, opengl or something like
that? The look remembers me on Adobe Air and i hope this is not their engine.

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mattparlane
Up next... Ruby!

How much I wonder? I can't decide whether it would be more complex than Python
or less...

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baddox
It seems like the difficulty would be relatively similar.

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smashing
Why does this project keep reminding me of Bitcoin?

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agravier
In both cases, the potential for change is large. It's the adoption of the
concept that will decide if it will change everything or remain a niche thing.

