

Lua-quick-try-out : A simple, low-barrier Lua IDE - minikomi
http://www.brischalle.de/Lua-Quick-Try-Out/Lua-Quick-Try-Out_en.html

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minikomi
The description:

A Lua IDE to quickly try out algorithms

Many years ago when i wrote my first programs on a Atari 800XL you only had to
turn on your computer wait some seconds and after that you could start to draw
lines our print some strings on the screen. Today computers are much faster
und programming is much more complex. Before you can draw lines, diagrams or
tables you have to build a GUI and you have to do a lot of other things that
have nothing to do with your problem that you want to be solved.

Sometimes I only want to check if an algorithm works as expected or I would
like to see the result of the computation of an intersection of lines or
circles by drawing a vector grafic. I would like to start to program my
algorithms without wasting time to build a GUI. Thats the reason why I started
to develop this tiny Lua IDE.

~~~
the1
today, you start a computer (possibly running chromeos or android), open a
browser and start writing multimedia documents, share with people, search
others' work, integrate with yours, remix... etc.

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petercooper
Not to diminish this work, since Lua is cool and all, but: _Before you can
draw lines, diagrams or tables you have to build a GUI and you have to do a
lot of other things that have nothing to do with your problem that you want to
be solved._ .. isn't quite true.

Even forgetting things like Processing, various projects exist for other
languages for visualization IDEs or to add graphics support to their REPLs. A
few: <http://ipython.org/> <http://kidsruby.com/> <http://hackety.com/>
<http://nodebox.net/> <http://docs.python.org/library/turtle.html> or even my
own <https://github.com/peterc/trtl>

~~~
primitur
I think you might be missing the point that he's trying to make, which is that
having the Lua VM is one thing, and great and everything, but you do still
need some interface to the raw devices - input/output - to make use of it in
any sense.

You can't build a user-application with the basic Lua VM in any fashion other
than as a command line tool. If you want more sophisticated GUI, you _do have
to wrap it_ somehow to get this working in the context of the Lua VM.

(Disclaimer: I'm currently developing professionally using the MOAI toolkit..)

There are plenty of solutions to the problem of not having a GUI/user-
interaction built-in, of course - you can emit .png files, or you could get
raw framebuffer support somehow, or you could even interface to the native GUI
.. but all of this has to be done extra, its not something that works, out of
the box, with the basic Lua VM ..

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dkersten
Looks cool.

One thing I was wondering is if there was anyway to read the table cells? And
read them interactively? (perhaps have the option of "on changed" event
callbacks) It would be really nice if the table can be used to control the
graphics output.

A suggestion - an option to swap the tabs (source code, table, diagram, etc)
between tabs and dock windows would be really really awesome, that way I
could, for example, view the source code and the graph side-by-side.

I haven't got the time to check out the source code right now, but maybe over
the weekend or early next week I will, so I may try and add these features
myself, so don't worry about it if you don't want to add them just now.

In any case, good job! I've been meaning to brush up on my Lua skills for a
while now and this seems like a great tool to use to play around with the
language.

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Ysx
Most of the download links are broken on the English site - looks like they're
pointing to the previous version. [http://www.brischalle.de/Lua-Quick-Try-
Out/Lua-Quick-Try-Out...](http://www.brischalle.de/Lua-Quick-Try-Out/Lua-
Quick-Try-Out.html) has the correct URLs.

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rijoja
This looks really nice, I'm a big fan of lua as it's really quick to develop
in and still minimal. It also seems to be relatively simple to integrate into
other programs.

I've been playing around a little with a lua based game framework called LÖVE
and that was a really pleasant experience. Perhaps you could integrate love
into Lua-quick-try. That would be a fantastic way to introduce people to
programming since you can get pretty results quickly. Most tutorials I've seen
starts with printing texts and calculating Fibonacci numbers which is good to
know but I'm sure that starting with writing a pong clone would be more
rewarding.

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primitur
Along similar lines, antirez' LOAD81:

<http://github.com/antirez/load81>

Lua sure is a lovely language for this sort of thing!

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moconnor
A great idea - it looks similar to the excellent NodeBox for Python
(<http://nodebox.net>). I'm very much in favor tools that make experimentation
faster and easier, for all the reasons that Bret Victor explains so well in
Inventing on Principle (<http://vimeo.com/36579366>).

~~~
dividuum
Wow. Didn't know about nodebox. I wrote a similar tool named info-beamer
(<http://info-beamer.org>). Its focus is livecoding for interactive OpenGL
visualizations. Think about digital signage controlled by Lua. It was inspired
by Inventing on Principle: I'm using inotify to reload the Lua code each time
you save. Documentation is at <http://info-beamer.org/doc/>

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edwinyzh
Wow, yet another proof of the "live coding" concept, this gives me yet more
confidence feeling about my live html/css/js code editor
(<http://liveditor.com>) ;)

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munchor
"Linux Mint" version? It should be "Debian" version. Mint is based off Ubuntu
which is based off Debian. ".deb" are for Debian-based distros, not for Linux
Mint.

~~~
viraptor
If they depend on something specific to Mint, or on Mint-specific versions of
packages, then these are Mint packages. I'm not sure if they do, but it's a
possibility.

Practically it may depend on where they were produced / tested. If Mint is all
the developers use, then it would be tricky for them to decide if the packages
are compatible with previous distros (Ubuntu, Debian)

~~~
ralfn
There is no such thing as 'mint-specific' packages.

It's just the Ubuntu repository, with a different default installation and
some 'out-of-repository' settings, script and GUI applications.

Mint is not a build target in any way shape or form. Ubuntu however, deviates
enough from Debian (patched kernel, patched/out-of-sync glibc, as well as
patched core libraries) that one would have to explicitely test on Debian
proper.

To call these packages Mint specific is like calling the windows executable
HP-Windows-Executable, because you had HP crapware preinstalled.

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scribblemacher
Excellent tool; does exactly what it's advertised to do.

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systems
i could not find license information on this site, any clue?

~~~
m_for_monkey
The source package contains the license: GPL version 3.

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victorbstan
Anything for Ubuntu?

~~~
primitur
I tried to use the Mint .debs on my system (Ubuntu 12.04-amd64) but there was
a dependency to libc6-amd64, which I didn't feel like fixing, so I downloaded
the sources, opened the project in QT Maker, built the project and ran it.
Works fantastically, and its nice to have a look at the sources too ..

