
New year, same old plans - harperlee
http://lighttable.com/2019/03/31/New-year-old-plans/
======
mortdeus
One thing that bothers me about new code editors/IDEs is that their developers
really don't do a good enough job researching and deriving inspiration from
the editors that already exist.

For example, I have yet to find any modern editor that draws inspiration from
the brilliantly designed ideas used in Plan 9's 'sam' and 'acme' editors.

For example structured regexps, 3 button mouse chording, and the 'plumb'
feature thats basically a context-aware, smarter version of a unix pipe
between two executables.

I mean i can go on and on but another thing that i find absolutely annoying
about newer editors is that they all use Webkit as the base of their apps core
foundation.

This makes it irritating to consider trying to make changes to the code that I
believe would overall improve the editor and make it more useful. (at least as
far as im concerned)

I can literally make a list a mile long of things I like in other editors and
wish i could see condensed into one ultimate code editor to supplant all code
editors that had come before.

~~~
arethuza
Given the amount of time that people spend using editors, you think it would
be worth some kind of wide ranging academic review article summarising the
history of this area.

Does such a thing exist?

~~~
ianai
Not academic, but vim has some serious range. I really wish more apps made an
effort to be mouse free.

But I also wish plan9 got more awareness. Unix pipes are so useful that it’s a
shame the plan9 paradigms have largely been ignored or reinvented.

~~~
threatofrain
Typing only on the keyboard can be very nice for posture, but I feel that Vim
users may think slightly differently if people invented a better keyboard with
a pointer device attached.

Then you wouldn't be "taking your hands off the keyboard", you'd just be
engaging in a different motion.

~~~
mst
That's how _I_ feel when using a keyboard with an integrated trackpoint.

Not everybody agrees, of course.

~~~
threatofrain
What keyboards have worked out for you?

~~~
css
Tex Yoda II:
[https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/index.php?l=product_det...](https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/index.php?l=product_detail&p=3532)

------
newcrobuzon
Any idea what happened to Chris Granger and the original LightTable/Eve plans?
If I am not mistaken they took some VC money right? How did that work out?
Would be really interested to hear their story and lessons learned.

Aside from that I was a big LightTable fan and really enjoyed its inline
instarepl and other features, so it is definitely great to see that LT is not
completely forgotten! Kudos!

~~~
guessmyname
> _Any idea what happened to Chris Granger and the original LightTable /Eve
> plans?_

The project is dead [1][2] as of Jan 24, 2018.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16227130](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16227130)

[2] [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/eve-
talk/YFguOGkNrBo/E...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/eve-
talk/YFguOGkNrBo/EozaCfheAQAJ)

~~~
passalong2019
His destiny is to start the same thing from scratch again and again...

~~~
erikpukinskis
Mine too. But every time I start again it's easier and better, and someday I
believe my work will "click".

I think the same is true of Chris.

------
StavrosK
Pratik will be able to talk more definitively about this, but the LightTable
project is seeking maintainers. If you'd like to help out, please consider
joining Code Shelter[1], this will enable you to join LightTable (after
talking with Pratik) and potentially a slew of other projects that need
help[2].

[1]: [https://www.codeshelter.co/](https://www.codeshelter.co/)

[2]:
[https://www.codeshelter.co/projects/](https://www.codeshelter.co/projects/)

~~~
theothergod
Yes, Definitely. Having multiple active maintainers really help to push the
project forward.

------
barrystaes
Back when i learned about Lighttable years ago i found the instant preview and
live editing of running code very cool!

I just realized thats basically what we already do today: i use WebStorm and
my webapp hot-reloads any code i type. If i wanted i could even rewind the app
state. And when i enable JS debug in IDE its like inception and matrix-view
combined, but surprisingly userfriendly still.

To easily try this with just about any IDE check out
[https://github.com/facebook/create-react-
app](https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app)

~~~
_bxg1
The difference is that LightTable gives you inline previews of individual
expressions, not just the final result. This is really nice to have for
debugging why the final result isn't what you expected.

------
pcr910303
Maybe starting a flame war, but isn’t this exactly what GNU Emacs & SLIME and
for other languages, REPL, LSP/DAP protocols for? While I appreciate his/her
effort (I appreciate everything related to developer’s ergonomics), I’m not
sure what differentiates lighttable. Maybe I’m missing something? Can anyone
explain?

~~~
klibertp
Pretty much the only advantage LT ever had over Emacs was the GUI layer
unburdened by decades of development and compatibility with TTYs. In other
words, the hope for LT was that it will allow a wide range of scriptable
graphical effects. While never explicitly stated, if you read early posts on
LT you'll see its feature list is basically 80% Emacs, 10% Smalltalk and 10%
eye-candy.

Many (five?) years later, from what I gather, LT has the eye-candy - the rest
is perpetually "under construction". It would be hard for it to be anything
else, though, as the main developers jumped ship a few years back to work on
Eve (which, as a karmic retribution for all my crushed hopes for LT, also
tanked and died recently).

Emacs may be less pretty than newer editors, and lots of its APIs are decades
old at this point, but it's still the only self-documenting, easily
discoverable and extensible editor this side of Pharo and Squeak, which can be
used in practice (due to a giant amount of plugins which bring it up to modern
standards) for almost any task.

TLDR: LightTable as a powerful editor for programmers is dead - it may be
still possible to revive it, but its scope would have to be massively scaled
down. It's not going to compete with Emacs & co. anymore, which is a shame,
because when it started it had the potential for this.

~~~
zimablue
I'd count being written in a small codebase in clojure and not literally a
million lines of e-lisp a big advantage that you haven't mentioned

~~~
lispm
GNU Emacs isn't written in a million lines of Emacs Lisp. It comes with a
library of applications, which has that much lines.

The core GNU Emacs is quite a bit less lines of Emacs Lisp.

~~~
zimablue
Thanks for the correction, I didn't know the count was including applications
which presumably could be enabled/disabled.

Do you have any idea how many lines of elisp/c the core is? And how gnarly it
is? I've read some stories.

~~~
klibertp
The "core" \- ie. Elisp code which is preloaded/included in the final 'emacs'
executable (as a memory dump of interpreter state) it's less than 80kloc of
Elisp. Emacs ships with ~300kloc of "standard" libraries and applications
written in Elisp (keep in mind: it's 300kloc of a high-level, fairly
expressive, Lispy language - so it translates into a _giant_ pile of
features). Further 400-500kloc of Elisp is from add-on packages available via
a built-in package manager. Actually, there's more code available, I just
counted the plugins I have installed locally.

IIRC Emacs' C code numbers ~300kloc and includes both bindings to low-level,
systems and GUI functionality, some parts of standard Elisp library (writen in
C for performance), as well as Elisp virtual machine, byte-compiler and so on.
No JIT yet, but at least there's threading support (take that JS :P).

Starting from scratch has many advantages, but it doesn't really work with
programs and systems large or complex enough. Otherwise we'd be using a fresh
OS every five years instead of working on one of the 5-6 OSes which were all
created 30+ years ago.

~~~
lispm
Thanks for the numbers!

------
bartq
May be relevant: [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MD-
CgzODFWzdpnYXr8bE...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MD-
CgzODFWzdpnYXr8bEgysfDmb8PDV6iCAjH5JIvaI/preview?slide=id.g1d7c11dd1b_0_348).

