
Light Table is in YCS12 - ibdknox
http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/05/17/light-table-is-in-yc/
======
Jun8
I have a comment that I thought about since I read this in the morning but
could be perhaps interpreted as negative, but I'm really curious as to what
people are thinking about this:

I think this news is _great_ , the quicker innovative editing tools like LT
appear the better. But I have an uneasy feeling about an incubator (even
though YC is the best one, IMO) or a VC scooping up projects from Kickstarter.
I always thought KS was a way for the intelligent nobodies to bypass the whole
incubator-VC-whatever system and to appeal directly to the masses. How to put
it, there's a sense of Olympic amateurishness (in the original sense of the
word) in KS projects. When they are picked up like this it sorts of negates
that sense.

What do you think?

~~~
brandall10
Hmm... that's an interesting perspective, I'm of the opposite opinion. I do
get the sentiment though.

There's a big difference between imagining something might be a great idea
because of intuition, A/B testing/market research, even launching and getting
engagement but no monetization... vs. getting people to actually put their
hard-earned dollars into it in advance of any available product.

To me, there's no stronger 'go' signal one can have. To an investor it takes
away all the mystery... do you even need a pitch? The only thing left is
whether or not the team can execute on the vision. And hence the value of a
great incubator to reduce friction on that end.

------
Cushman

      While being a part of YC doesn't affect our plans or change
      our use of Kickstarter as a means of accelerating the
      release of Light Table, many pledged with the explicit
      purpose of making sure that it had a chance. With YC that
      chance is now safe and we wanted to let our supporters know
      there will be no hard feelings if this changes your desire
      to pledge.
    

Light Table uses Kickstarter to demonstrate market demand, YC responds to
demand with funding, Light Table effectively offers to buy back Kickstarter
pledges with YC money just to be nice. Wacky.

There are a lot of ways to read the situation, but my favorite is that Light
Table makes sense purely as a strategic acquisition for YC; there are enough
YC companies using the languages Light Table targets that, should it yield
magical productivity gains, the knock-on effects from being able to get their
developers early access and input would be enormous. If they wind up changing
the future of software development, all the better.

~~~
batista
>There are a lot of ways to read the situation, but my favorite is that Light
Table makes sense purely as a strategic acquisition for YC; there are enough
YC companies using the languages Light Table targets that, should it yield
magical productivity gains, the knock-on effects from being able to get their
developers early access and input would be enormous. If they wind up changing
the future of software development, all the better.*

This sounds like a really lame conspiracy theory. YC got LT to "yield magical
productivity gains" to it's companies? Please. Even if the programmers dropped
their editors (Emacs, etc) to adopt LT, the productivity gains would be
marginal. And code productivity at that level is not the bottleneck for a
startup success either.

A decent product people want to use, connections, and chance are far more
important. For all the "we used Lisp so we did it faster/better" bragging,
Yahoo could almost just as easily buy any other ViaWeb competitor for example,
even one using the lamest of methodologies.

Downvotes? People believe that using a better editor/IDE will yield "magical
productivity gains" for a company?

Or that ViaWeb succeeded because it was in Lisp? Well, how about the other 99%
of companies, that succeeded based on lame technologies, from Facebook's PHP,
to whatever. One company doing something successfully among thousands is as
far from a proof as you can get. Post-fact rationalization sounds more like it
("Oh, we got bought. It was because we were ultra-productive programmers
yielding Lisp").

~~~
ShardPhoenix
While I sort-of agree with your point, I think you're being unnecessarily
hostile here.

~~~
batista
I might come of a little hostile yes. I dislike the cult aspect of the whole
story, that is.

And I think the "ViaWeb/Lisp -> super programming capabilities over mere
mortals -> Yahoo millions" thing that started the whole cult worship is both
wrong and flawed (e.g statistically insignificant to prove anything).

~~~
BrandonM
But why does it anger you so much?

Besides, you seem to be ignoring that ViaWeb was built before there were
ubiquitous open source libraries for practically everything. My guess is that
they basically had to write the whole
server/application/persistence/security/payment stack themselves from scratch.
Considering that they were able to build it all with a handful (2-4?) of
programmers and to beat out competition that had a head start and a much
higher head count, I would wager that Lisp had at least a little something to
do with it.

~~~
batista
> _But why does it anger you so much?_

So much? I just made a comment, it's not like I'm running around foaming at
the mouth, is it?

> _Besides, you seem to be ignoring that ViaWeb was built before there were
> ubiquitous open source libraries for practically everything. My guess is
> that they basically had to write the whole
> server/application/persistence/security/payment stack themselves from
> scratch. Considering that they were able to build it all with a handful
> (2-4?) of programmers and to beat out competition that had a head start and
> a much higher head count, I would wager that Lisp had at least a little
> something to do with it._

I agree. But wouldn't something like Smalltalk be equally good for the same
purpose? Or Perl?

------
ibdknox
We normally would wait to announce this until it was time to drum up the press
machine, but it was more important to us that you guys know what's going on.

If anyone has specific questions/concerns, I'll be lurking.

~~~
scarredwaits
I initially donated to make sure light table becomes a reality, but I will not
withdraw my donation because I think this is a _very_ worthwhile project and I
still feel proud to support it. In other words: SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!!!

~~~
mey
I was planning to contribute towards the end of the campaign, but now that the
kickstarter is successful AND YC is taking it under it's wings, I'm going to
wait to be a retail customer.

Wish you the best of luck, this project is very interesting.

------
pwny
The YC backing actually made me pledge. I held back initially figuring that I
would easily be able to buy a license further down the road without taking the
risk of seeing you guys give up (no offense intended!) However, getting into
YC makes me appreciate how very serious you are and so I treated myself to an
early beta.

Good luck, I'm REALLY looking forward to trying Light Table out :)

~~~
HCIdivision17
Ditto. If the timeline for releases accelerates, I want to have early access
to this awesome tool!

------
gaius
Does this mean Python support in version 1 is more or less likely?

~~~
ibdknox
We're sticking with our goal on Kickstarter - if we hit 300k we'll definitely
do it. There's a decent chance we will either way though.

~~~
gaius
Thanks for the reply :-) Another question if I may: YC funding amounts to $5k
- what difference will that drop in the ocean make?

~~~
jgeralnik
In this case YC is not about the funding but about the support and
connections.

------
TeeWEE
I dont see how light table is different than an good ide for java.

\- docs everywhere

When i hover over a symbol, method or class i get the documentation right in
my IDE

\- instant feedback

Ok this is new but can only be done for simple calculations

\- table as a unit of work

Saying that "we can de better than files" is true. In fact in my IDE i just
dragndrop methods around, navigate the class hierarchy, etc. Its just
coincidence that every class is represented as a file. But i do not care. The
point is that i write code against the AST and not against "plain text". The
IDE parses the code on the spot. This is nothing new.

So all in all i dont see a lot of new concepts.

~~~
FuzzyDunlop
Light Table isn't a Java IDE, so this isn't a fair comparison.

For a dynamic language, where a REPL will no doubt be part of your workflow,
an IDE that aims to merge the process of editing and interacting is probably
quite valuable. Like emacs with slime but less daunting to the unfamiliar.

------
JiPi
This is some great news! I hope that will make Ruby and CoffeeScript support
come sooner! :)

------
pnathan
Congratulations!

Do you anticipate using the SLIME/SWANK style backends? Reason why I ask is
because I do a lot of Common Lisp coding and this would be an interesting
project to give a spin.

------
DannoHung
Does this change the story on it being open source?

~~~
ibdknox
Nope! The plan is still for the platform to be open source, likely under a
GPLish license.

~~~
gaius
What will a "license" for LT then include?

~~~
JackC
The Kickstarter says that it might get you access to a packaged build, and
that the price might be pay-what-you-want -- sounds a lot like the NeoOffice
business model (
[https://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/mirrors.php?file=NeoOff...](https://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/mirrors.php?file=NeoOffice-3.2.1-Intel.dmg#download)
).

But making money from open source projects is hard enough, and varied enough,
that it makes sense to spend a lot of time thinking about and experimenting
with this one before committing to anything. It looks like that's what they're
doing. So I don't think there will be a firm answer to this until they're much
closer to launch -- or that it would be a good idea to offer one.

~~~
kamaal
If LightTable wants to be the 'Eclipse' of clojure and Python then it needs to
be open source.

Mass adoption, patches, test cases, design, feedback and money comes only when
it reaches crazy adoption and a lot of people hack on it.

That is why it is important for LightTable to release a minimal usable version
ASAP and then improve it in further releases.

All this needs a open source set up. A Cathedral set up earlier but a bazaar
set up later.

------
puredanger
Chris Granger (@ibdknox) will be doing a talk in September at the Strange Loop
conference - <https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/behind-the-mirror>.

------
c4urself
This is Light Table: <http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table>

------
timmc
I appreciate your transparency in this.

I'm keeping my pledge in, though. :-)

------
mangler
OK now, this is a whole new business model and I like it. Early supporters pay
for the demo and get a t-shirt. Later supporters pay for the continuing
refinement of the demo and get a t-shirt. Later supporters pay for the demo
and get a t-shirt a mention somewhere.

When the demo is awesome (but not open to the public) and also the market can
be assessed based on early support, someone (who saw the latest demo and the
early support) pays for the rest, but what they get is a cut from any
potential future cash flows. Now, this, is, neat!!!

Incidentally, this is the problem with Kickstarter - if you want money, don't
give me a t-shirt, give me a part of your future profit. Then people who back
bad ideas suffer and people who back good ideas profit. As opposed to the
current model, where everyone gets a cheap shitty t-shirt and the world gets
another worthless r&b record that nobody wants.

------
nextparadigms
I haven't followed the discussions much before, but will this support Android
development sometime in the future?

~~~
vibrunazo
Why exactly would you want support for Android development? As far as I
understand, LightTable's target are languages which doesn't already have the
tools they're offering (dynamic scripting languages like JS, python etc). The
existing Android dev tools already have all the features that LightTable is
bringing to them. We already have those in Eclipse, we don't need LightTable.
Only the dynamic languages with poor tooling does.

(If you're an Android developer who misses some of the features of LightTable,
you should look for some tutorials at www.eclipse.org, you'll learn eclipse
can already do those and much more)

~~~
swah
If Eclipse encompassed what LightTable wants to achieve, one would only have
to write a plugin... I think its trying to be something completely
different...

------
TwiztidK
Cool. Now this definitely happens, likely sooner with more out of the box
support, and I still get a T-shirt (assuming everyone on Kickstarter doesn't
drop their pledges now). So, it's basically a win-win-win situation.

~~~
flurpitude
I just made a pledge anyway. Whatever we can do to help make this a reality
seems like a worthwhile use of money to me. It looks like a great piece of
software.

------
kombine
I am personally much more impressed with Code bubbles which as been around for
2 years and which I shamefully missed at a time of its appearance. Of course
it's less talked about, as there is certainly less hype about Java than
Clojure and Javascript, but a statically typed language benefits a lot more
from this concept, rather than dynamically typed.

~~~
vinodkd
seconded. not to take anything away from LT, but i'd really like to see it
deal with a large codebase.

------
thatmiddleway
I upped my pledge after reading this. Even more excited to be able to see the
early betas and play with the future.

------
peteysd
This is very exciting news! I see this as being a very good thing for both
Light Table and Clojure in general.

------
jcarden
Awesome. Way to go Chris!

------
Jun8
Now, if only YC can invest in TextMate so that we can have 2.0!

~~~
getsat
TextMate 2 came out a while ago. It changed its name to "Sublime Text 2" and
it is awesome.

~~~
Jun8
You must be talking about the alpha release that was released end of last
year? My joke about TM's new release turned out to be not so good.

~~~
jaredsohn
I'm pretty sure that the GP just made a joke that at least didn't work for
you.

The GP is likely referring to this sentiment: "I started to realize that
Sublime Text seemed to be everything many of us had hoped for in Textmate 2,
but in software that was available today in a polished, fully functional
version, not a just a rather buggy alpha preview."

\-- [http://casperfabricius.com/site/2012/01/24/my-first-week-
wit...](http://casperfabricius.com/site/2012/01/24/my-first-week-with-sublime-
text-2/)

~~~
1234the1234
If only all these attempts at vim clones were instead spent on vim.

~~~
krakensden
Sublime Text is most definitely _not_ a vim clone. It may have a vi-ish mode,
but it's fairly weak. Sublime Text is in the TextMate/Notepad++ space.

~~~
1234the1234
Wait did you just say that TextMate wasn't based on vim?

