
Light Table funding successful, including Python support (over $300k raised) - sthlm
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table?ref=email
======
ibdknox
Thanks to everyone:

<http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/06/01/45-days-later/>

~~~
guelo
Congrats on the funding! I'm sure you have excellent advisers and business
plans at this point but I'm still going to be presumptuous and offer my
advice: you need to be really frugal. $300k is not huge runway and before you
know it will be gone. You need to keep any and all overhead low and plow as
much as possible into development. Your project is ambitious and expectations
are high, you need leeway for false starts, do-overs, pivots, impatient users,
fickle press, etc.

I'm really hoping along with 7,316 other people that you can pull it off. Good
luck!

~~~
moe
_$300k is not huge runway_

I like lighttable (and donated, too), but this is getting ridiculous.

$300k is one hell of a runway. Neither Vim nor Emacs had any kind of runway.
Hardly any bootstrapped startup has that kind of money lying around.

The onus is now on him to deliver something worthwhile. $300k can
_comfortably_ carry an individual for 4+ years, no frugality needed at all. I
sure hope we'll see results sooner than that.

~~~
bangbang
Naw, your parent is right. When you have a legit business running, there's
lots of expenses that come along with it. State, local, county taxes,
accountant to keep the rest out of trouble. If you have an employee, there's
yet more taxes, business insurance, liability insurance the expenses really go
on and on. That 300K is more like 200k, and if he wants to have help (mediocre
help), it's more like 130K (50K+employment taxes, benefits?) that is unless he
wants 2 helpers then it's more like 85k and that's if he doesn't pay
himself... It really isn't much money. Heaven forbid he needs to buy licensing
for some IP along the way.

~~~
moe
Bullshit. He needs food, shelter and a laptop.

If my money gets abused for turning this into a lifestyle-business (employees?
buy IP? WTF?) then I'll demand a refund.

He's building a freakin' text-editor, not a Mars-rocket.

~~~
durandal1
Do you apply this logic to all businesses you interact with?

------
bryze
I have my own ideas about how to do this, and I'm glad someone is moving in
this direction, but I must ask, is this a stepping stone in a grander vision?
Enemies of software development today are:

1\. Code Comprehension: Can new people quickly understand a complex code base
enough to implement significant features. 2\. Fault Diagnosis: When is the
last time you spent less than 50% of a project's time on debugging? 3\. Code
Transformation: Have you ever actually tried to factor a mega-function into
separate functions? How about creating a set of concrete classes when you
realize that your hierarchy abstraction breaks down under new requirements.
Now do all that without introducing new bugs.

These are the hard problems, and it excites me that people are thinking about
how to solve them. This tool will not solve all those problems, and maybe one
tool shouldn't, but nevertheless I hope people will start thinking about the
entire development process and how to improve all the tools of our industry.

~~~
cageface
Java + a good modern IDE like IntelliJ are far from the last word on all these
questions, of course, but they're much better than you might guess if you
have't worked in that world for a while. I was astonished at how powerful the
combination of a simple, statically typed language and a good IDE can be. You
can almost completely stop thinking of code as a bunch of text and start
thinking about it as an organically evolving structure.

The tooling around dynamic languages is almost laughably primitive and limited
in comparison.

~~~
irahul
> The tooling around dynamic languages is almost laughably primitive and
> limited in comparison.

Somethings just can't be done.

    
    
        class Foo:
            def foo():
                pass
    
        def bar(f):
            f.foo
    

If you re-factor Foo.foo to Foo.renamed, there is no way to know if the call
in bar should be re-named as well.

~~~
regularfry
Sure there is. You just need code tracing and full test coverage. You can't do
it from the source alone, sure, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.

~~~
irahul
> Sure there is. You just need code tracing and full test coverage. You can't
> do it from the source alone, sure, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.

The analog would be driving to New York from Bangalore. Sure it can be done if
I arrange a car; have money for the fuel, food and stay; have all the papers
etc etc. But that doesn't mean it is in any way comparable to flying to New
York while watching a movie and sipping wine.

Renaming a method in the public interface is always a pain - your test
coverage and code tracing can numb down it a bit, but it's going to be there.
Some of it is because public interfaces are a constant for all practical
intent and purpose; most of it is because of the case I listed above.

~~~
regularfry
I think I might not have made myself clear - given an execution trace of a
test suite with full coverage (or just something which exercises every code
path - it doesn't have to be a test suite, but you've already got one of those
so you might as well use it, right?), you could build a tool to make a rename
refactoring fully automatic in a dynamic language. At the point of use, it
would be identical to a static language rename, it would just work in a
different way. It's a fairly obvious idea, so I presume this has been done in
the past, but I don't know of any examples offhand.

The only gotcha is where you're eval'ing a string, but that's going to be
nasty however you cut it.

------
DivisibleByZero
It's really exciting to see a great development tool. While I love vim and
will passionately fight for it's place as the best 'text editor'. I readily
recognize it's faults as a development environment.

All the other tools I've seen up to this point seem to be a text editor with
plugins or additional components stacked on top. Even IDEs seem to follow this
pattern and are development tools built on a text editor.

It is nice to see a holistic approach to designing development environment
from the ground up. To me light table looks to be the first real development
environment as opposed to an improvement.

------
redthrowaway
Glad I got in when a license was $15. If there's one feature I'd like in the
future, it's extensibility. Let dev communities write their own plugins for
languages, so it doesn't all fall on Granger's lap.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
It's not just desirable; it's absolutely required. Look at every successful
dev environment and you'll see a large community of developers making it
better. Those that survive in spite of this (eg Xcode) do so because something
else forces their continued existence (such as being the only way onto the
iPhone).

------
fernandezpablo
They say:

"Ultimately the goal of the platform is to be a highly extensible work
surface"

Still they needed 100k for adding Python support?

I guess ruby/scala support is not happening anytime soon.

~~~
sthlm
I thought the whole budget was rather low compared to the total value that is
to be created.

Sure, 100k for 1 language sounds odd, given that 200k was enough not only for
2 languages, but also the entire framework. Still, the overall price point is
more than fair.

You have to take into consideration that Light Table aims to be specific;
adding further languages will likely result in more efforts than merely
adjusting an IDE a little bit.

~~~
duaneb
Of course, the more popular language, the higher the value. $200k for a
clojure IDE is certainly overvalued for the number of people using it, but
$300k is way undervalued for python. Not sure about javascript; obviously it's
popular, but it's unclear whether this ide supports anything but niche (non-
browser) use.

~~~
michaelsbradley
Depending on how its Clojure support is implemented, LightTable may be usable
for ClojureScript projects, and thus allow developers to target browsers and
NodeJS (and other JS runtimes).

Do a search for "Pluggable Backend Infrastructure for ClojureScript, and
Development of a Lua backend" and you should turn up a Google Summer of Code
2012 project which seeks to broaden the scope of the ClojureScript compiler.
If that project is successful, and if LightTable supports ClojureScript, the
IDE's reach may be greatly expanded in the relatively near term.

~~~
duaneb
Sure, but you still need to use Clojure, which is very unlikely to be of use
to the average programmer.

~~~
tel
I somewhat doubt he's targeting the average programmer.

------
nivertech
So the total funding will be something like:

$484K =~ $316K from KS + $18K from YC + $150K from Start Fund?

~~~
dkersten
-KS's cut

~~~
JackC
\- Amazon's cut - prize fulfillment costs

At smaller scales, there can be a huge difference between sticker price and
what you actually have to work with:

[http://kotaku.com/5902280/what-the-hell-these-game-
developer...](http://kotaku.com/5902280/what-the-hell-these-game-developers-
did-with-your-kickstarter-money)

------
soapdog
I am a backer and I just want to say that I am anxious to see it running... =)

------
voxx
I can't believe they (devs) chose python over ruby or java or scala or
ANYTHING but python.

~~~
theootz
And what's wrong with Python?

~~~
sgrove
Python's a great fit, certainly a more straight-forward one than java/scala.
Presumably python/ruby would be equally interesting additions to Light Table

