

In-browser mini IDE and Programming Language - ANaimi
http://www.algorithmatic.com/new

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gvb
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.

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

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

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halostatue
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.

~~~
sirrocco
>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.

~~~
halostatue
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).

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DanielStraight
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.

~~~
ANaimi
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 ;)

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geocar
Requires Silverlight 3, eh?

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

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DanielStraight
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.

~~~
bmj
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.

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

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

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

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drothlis
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.

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stevejohnson
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?

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

~~~
ANaimi
It's Algorithmatic! see
[http://www.algorithmatic.com/wiki/display/algorithmatic-
refe...](http://www.algorithmatic.com/wiki/display/algorithmatic-reference-
manual)

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

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clistctrl
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.

