Eve Development Blog, from Light Table developers

by dahjelle • 12 years ago

83 74 12 years ago

duaneb2• 12 years ago

God, that's confusing. I thought this was the EVE development blog, i.e. http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/. Eve is, frankly, a terrible name for a tool. It sounds like a brand name and gives ZERO indication as to its utility.

At the very least, the post (edit: post title) could give some indication as to what the hell Eve is and why I should care—it looks like a spreadsheet meets a repl.

slowmovintarget• 12 years ago

As an Eve On-Line player: same here. Spreadsheet with a REPL... might help crunch market orders.

dang2• 12 years ago

We restored the submitter's title which made the Light Table connection explicit.

duaneb2• 12 years ago

Thanks, dang!

_halgari• 12 years ago

Sadly, even then I thought the title was about how CCP (makers of EVE Online) were using LightTable in development...

divs1210• 12 years ago

Nice thought, nice venture. I hope it leads to unexplored territory. Good to see constant tests with potential users, and no fear of making major changes.

lbotos• 12 years ago

What's going on with Light Table? Anyone use it? Is it "done"? Python? JS? It was hot for a while and I haven't heard anything in a bit.

state• 12 years ago

I just ditched it. It's so close to being good, but there are a ton of small bugs that can add up to being quite frustrating. It's no where near the level of a tool that will be used as much as an editor.

And now it looks like they have found something else more interesting to work on anyway.

zindlerb2• 12 years ago

I don't know about python, but Javascript works great. The killer app for me is using the editor as an integrated repl for JS.

skizm• 12 years ago

Doesn't pretty much any browser have this? If you're doing JS dev, chances are you have a browser open.

cbp• 12 years ago

It's been opensourced which as far as I can tell, means that the developers wash their hands now and leave to move on to new, easier and more fun things than writing a decent text editor. They delivered half of what they promised 1 year overdue. But I guess if you want something done now you're free to write it yourself ;)

gaius• 12 years ago

"Free" as in speech, beer, and a massive Kickstarter.

jamii15• 12 years ago

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/light-table-discussi...

TLDR: There are three new maintainers (https://github.com/one-more-minute https://github.com/cldwalker https://github.com/joshuafcole). The docs are now community owned. The plugin server will be soon. We will be hosting a weekly hack night in our new office to get community members up to speed.

scrollaway• 12 years ago

I'm glad to see you guys picked up the pace big time. Really glad. Props.

zubairq• 12 years ago

This is really good to see!

segmondy• 12 years ago

you can check it out on github https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable last commit 19 hours ago.

virmundi2• 12 years ago

I tried using it as I'm just learning clojure. I'm okay with learning new things if they're worth my time, but I didn't find the editor worth its resources. On OS X, Light Table uses more memory than Eclipse + Counterclockwise (on Ubuntu). After seeing that, I dropped it and went to Eclipse (save RAM and cognitive load).

ibdknox3• 12 years ago

Huh. I just opened a brand new download of eclipse and it's at 440mb with no files open. LT is 115 + 50 having been open all week.

Did you have some weird plugins installed? Did you create a bunch of Clojure processes and count those?

EDIT: Ah, there was a memory leak for a while. I bet that's what the problem was. It's definitely fixed in master.

mkohlmyr• 12 years ago

It's been my main editor pretty much since release, mainly for JavaScript and Python. I mainly use it as a snazzier gedit with some neat features like live markdown preview and built-in browser tab.

I still run PyCharm in a separate workspace for debugging, running programs and searching through code, but for editing I find LightTable is wildly preferable imo.

There are some mostly minor annoyances, like the behaviours file simply switched locations at one point, and for some odd reason I can't get the tab settings to work properly for makefiles and such.

I will probably stick with LightTable for the forseeable future, nothing else quite seems to hit my sweet spot. Admittedly I haven't actually tried sublime text.

ericHosick9• 12 years ago

Passing cursors quickly became tedious when trying to change code. If a function suddenly needed access to IO the cursor had to be passed down through every function above it in the callstack.

This is the function-calling train issue and what happens if you try to make a sort of quasi homoiconic language ("Hierarchical organisation of data complects the data itself with the common access paths.") and attempt a push-pull approach to programming (you push the data down into the hierarchy) with traditional data scoping through parameters.

The bad is not the hierarchical organization of data. That is the correct direction.

The bad is trying to use a traditional scoping approach to what is effectively a homoiconic type language. Homoiconic type systems need a different scoping approach.

DennisP• 12 years ago

So how should it be done?

seanmcdirmid11• 12 years ago

Dynamic scoping?

seabee• 12 years ago

In my favourite homoiconic language, Racket (also in lisps, so it's surprising that OP didn't mention it) you'd typically accomplish it with parameterised dynamic binding. Think global variables, except the lifetime of the new value is limited to a body of code.

A concrete example is a function that writes something to stdout. If you want to output to a file instead, parameterise the function call by setting current-output-port to the handle of your file.

ericHosick9• 12 years ago

The way we do scoping now is to rely on the programming language which is basically the stack.

But we can implement our own scoping mechanisms based on the domain we are developing a program in.

For example, Eve mentioned that they were looking at a sort of "Excel" spreadsheet type visual language.

The scoping mechanism of spreadsheets are a sheet with row/column. So, I would create objects that are able to quickly pull from a row/column and push into a row/column. For example, somewhere in their hierarchy they had an algorithm that required access to a cursor.

Since it is a spreadsheet we can have our global active spreadsheet which, somewhere, contains the cursor. We know it is there because we put it there.

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the data hierarchy we have this line of code to get a cursor:

    var cursorCurrent = global.curSpread[34,65];

because our scoping mechanism is based on an excel spreadsheet and not the one "forced" on us by the programming language: usually a stack.

There is no need to push that current cursor down the function calling train and, in the end, it is probably faster because we are doing a simple cell lookup.

chipsy3• 12 years ago

Why is hierarchical organization correct?

ericHosick9• 12 years ago

They are going for a visual language, and visual languages are inherently hierarchal. The goal is to easily represent context of any part of a program in a visual way.

Trying to map source-code that stores a lot of it's context on the stack is really hard to visually represent. Trying to represent the stack in a visual way makes for a icky looking visual language.

However, if you can keep all of the context/state of your program in one area and it is hierarchal... Then, you can build great visual representations of your program because, really, you are displaying a data-structure (your program becomes a data-structure). So, all the cool things you can do visually representing data-structures, you can do with your actual program.

jamii15• 12 years ago

The bad is not the hierarchical organization of data. That is the correct direction.

This is just a repeat of the xml database vs relational database debate. This fight has been fought so many times before - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.113....

ericHosick9• 12 years ago

The context of the discussion is the representation of state within an executing program.

Xml database, key-value-store, relational databases, csv files, etc. are all ways of persisting.

These are very different disciplines with very different problems being solved.

minikomi2• 12 years ago

If the blog maintainer is about - can you allow user zooming on mobile? The screenshots are very tricky to look at and are important to the context of this blog I think.

bkurtz13• 12 years ago

In that same vein, the dotted pattern in background makes it subtly harder to read the text

jamii15• 12 years ago

You can click though on the images.

gone352• 12 years ago

Use this bookmarklet to un-cripple the page (from [1]):

  javascript:document.querySelector('meta[name=viewport]')
    .setAttribute('content','
      width=device-width,
      initial-scale=1.0,
      maximum-scale=10.0,
      user-scalable=1
    ');

Shame on the author to force users to retort to hacks like this, by the way. "B-but you can click on the images!" is not an answer, damn it [2]. Pinch-and-zoom is arguably the premier feature/innovation of the post-iOS era, for you geniuses to disable it for whatever UI/UX cargo-culting fad is going through your head. Seriously. Just stop [3].

[1] http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/28391/how-can-i-for...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8468745

[3] http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

ibdknox3• 12 years ago

What an aggressive response. :/

Thanks for the indirect pointer on how to correct the issue though. If you hard refresh you can zoom now.

dusklight• 12 years ago

Eve, Aurora, Light Table, these names all share the similar property in that they are difficult to google because they are common words. We've already gone through this once with go, can we please get a name that is going to be easy to search for?

Eve Development Blog, from Light Table developers

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