Bret Victor's live editable game in ClojureScript

http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/02/26/connecting-to-your-creation/

by ibdknox • 14 years ago

145 32 14 years ago

Applying this to more than just games, you could probably make a really good tool for mathematical modeling of physical situations. Speed would be an issue, but it would be a good way to test out ideas quickly.

asolove• 14 years ago

This idea is the subject of Bret's essay "Up and down the ladder of abstraction" [1] which is a fantastic read.

[1] http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

zackzackzack2• 14 years ago

I remember geeking out to that when it came out! Since reading that I have been playing around with d3 a good deal to try and be able to make some of the stuff he has. I've been slaving away at this for the past few days actually: http://zacharymaril.com/analytics/

This afternoon, I will put up a better version (this one won't work for you due to some figuration stuff), but this takes in your google analytics data and maps it a bit better than the normal set up.

jisaacstone• 14 years ago

Awesome and Awesome.

Looks like today is the day that I learn clojure! ^^

Tim-Boss• 14 years ago

I haven't quite yet recovered from a weekend of sleep deprivation, and was entirely disappointed to learn that the link was for an "editable game", not an "edible game"...

nodemaker• 14 years ago

Bret's talk has the potential to transform lives.

But anyone has any idea how to do something like that on iOS/Xcode?

etcet• 14 years ago

This is really cool. One problem I've noticed with real time evaluation is infinite loops. I've played with an realtime javascript editor/evaluator and I inadvertently locked the browser (and the editor) when writing code. Imagine writing a "while (true)" loop and it evaluates before you've finished the break condition.

deniska• 14 years ago

If simulation runs (and it should) in the different thread, then nothing bad happens.

amasad4• 14 years ago

ClojureScript compiler being written in Clojure is a huge disadvantage. It should be written in JavaSript or ideally self-hosting. That way for this project you wouldn't need the server and when its hosted somewhere there is no need to the compile round-trip each time the code changes. Also as a plus you'd have eval!

swannodette3• 14 years ago

self-hosting only gets you bragging rights and neat demos - it offers little advantage for real applications targeting JavaScript. That said, ClojureScript now implements most of Clojure - if someone wanted to bootstrap ClojureScript for fun it wouldn't be much work, go for it.

amasad4• 14 years ago

"I didn't put it up on heroku because the latency kills the real-time aspect of it."

There is your advantage, if it was self-hosting then this wouldn't be an issue.

brown9-2• 14 years ago

Do you guys think Bret Victor built an actual editor for his "live editing" demo, or just build enough of a demo to illustrate his principle?

It seems to me that if what he had built was a real editor (i.e. could be used for more than just his Braid demo game), there would be immense value in releasing/selling it.

grinich• 14 years ago

Sometimes the seed of an idea is more important to get right than the finished product.

BrainScraps• 14 years ago

Such a man of mystery, this Bret Victor is!

vdm2• 14 years ago

Reply: https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/174204355220738048

robbrit• 14 years ago

One of the students asked this during the Q&A period at the end of the talk, he said it was just some Javascript and HTML cooked up to do just the things that he showed. So it wasn't a real demo, only something he whipped up to demonstrate the ideas but wouldn't be available to use for actual coding.

merengue• 14 years ago

Check Victor's javascript library: Tangle. http://worrydream.com/Tangle/

Gotttzsche• 14 years ago

hmm, when you unpause, the player just falls straight down rather, ignoring the velocity it should have.

also, in the talk the player's path was projected into the future, iirc, not just showing the past

ibdknox2• 14 years ago

He rolled the player back, so it wasn't projected into the future, it was just he adjusted the current position backwards. you fall straight down because your velocity is dependent on whether or not you have the key pressed. Jump and let go of the arrow.

bjconlan• 14 years ago

Wow that is a great example! Kudos Chris.

I would also like to point some of the commenters to (fluxus) http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/. It is a very nice example of this concept of the same thing, only using racket/plt scheme.

Live coding/reactive code are fantastic little ideas which I wish had been exposed to me earlier in my career.

gncvalente74• 14 years ago

amazing !

ibdknox2• 14 years ago

I just added a downloadable jar for it as well: https://github.com/ibdknox/live-cljs/downloads

  java -jar live-cljs.jar

nileshtrivedi• 14 years ago

After I saw this talk, I thought about what it would take for making such an editor for general-purpose programming (and not just drawing or simulations).

I came up with this basic UI concept: http://livecoding.staticloud.com/

vdm2• 14 years ago

That's exactly what I had in mind for running tests, I think you're definitely on the right track. Great work!

recurve72• 14 years ago

I notice in your Overtone + ClojureScript screencast you were using VIM on Mac, but this looked different. Are you using SublimeText here or Noir itself as the editor?

recurve72• 14 years ago

Also, what editor/tools do you recommend for general Clojure, ClojureScript, or Noir development and why?

Bret Victor's live editable game in ClojureScript

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