Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom

by willwhitney • 11 years ago

190 70 11 years ago

ibdknox• 11 years ago

This is very cool work. :) Great job Will!

When Atom was first launched I mentioned that it might make sense to port the interesting parts of LT over to it since the core editor isn't what's important (and it's also a ton of work to get right). LT has found its way into lots of projects, from the Chrome Dev Tools to XCode and IntelliJ, which is a tremendous honor for us - it's great to see it coming to Atom as well.

willwhitney13• 11 years ago

Thanks for the support!

I've been thinking a lot about what makes for a good development experience, and how to properly "factorize" an IDE to provide a consistent experience across different languages. The monolithic IDE experience can be great (once you get it set up) if all your work is in a single language. But for people like me, having a confusingly different development environment for each project is a nightmare.

This is a tiny step toward the dream of having a consistent core editor but with powerful tools for each language that allow introspection into the state of the running machine.

wferrell• 11 years ago

Will -- Nice work! Been hoping for something like this and an excuse to use Atom

stuaxo• 11 years ago

This is great, I've been thinking in a similar about something like this for 'visual debugging', for a livecoding tool.

It would be great if this could recognise some common image formats in memory (cairo surfaces, PIL) and visualise those on mouseover.

Possibly similar for arrays - be able to visualise it as a wave or even playback as audio.

Is there any chance of factoring out the support for the popouts? - It would be great if this could appear in other editors.

revenz• 11 years ago

Can you expand on where I might find details on LT in intellij?

redtuesday• 11 years ago

Would be interested in this as well. I only know the "Scala Worksheet" which is similar: https://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/IntelliJIDEA/Workin... and apeared first in Scala-Ide.

lemming• 11 years ago

I think he's referring to the in-editor debug values in IntelliJ v14.

bryanjos• 11 years ago

That looks so cool! I'm not an Atom user anymore (jumped back to Sublime), but this is the kind of thing that makes me want to jump back again. Wondering if there is an equivalent for Sublime.

dethstar• 11 years ago

There's plugins for different languages e.g RubyEval

wldcordeiro• 11 years ago

SublimeREPL exists as well and it does a great job for many languages.

rattray2• 11 years ago

SublimeCodeIntel doesn't do quite the same thing, but does at least provide intelligent code completion for languages including Python. I think it can be a bit buggy, though - and this actually has the autocompletes come from the kernel, which is clearly better.

In short, I'm in the same boat about wanting to jump back to Atom. Just want to wait on improved performance, which I hear is in the works.

jinxedID• 11 years ago

I wonder if they know their logo is also the Ionic logo?

willwhitney13• 11 years ago

Shit, really?

Huh. I just banged this out in ten minutes when I needed an icon for autocomplete. I'll change it.

gabeio2• 11 years ago

I feel like it's not/shouldn't be possible to copyright/trademark/etc an element/element's atomic structure unless it's man made.

joshuapants• 11 years ago

Regardless of whether that's the case, it's probably best to avoid having a logo that looks very similar to another, if only to avoid confusion.

That said, the atomic structure isn't the concern but rather a specific artistic visualization of it which may be protected.

zyxley• 11 years ago

But the copyright (if there is one in this case) isn't on the element, it's on the specific visual interpretation of it for branding purposes.

PetitPrince• 11 years ago

And also Dr. Manhattan from the Watchmen, slightly rotated.

shepardrtc• 11 years ago

Very cool is an understatement. I can't imagine the amount of work that is going on behind the scenes to orchestrate this.

willwhitney13• 11 years ago

Most of the credit goes to the Jupyter team and the people who have implemented the kernels for various languages. The Jupyter API spec is what has made this possible. I'm really looking forward to what can be done next (hint: https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/issues/99)

RangerScience• 11 years ago

What's the state of using this with non-Python languages?

willwhitney13• 11 years ago

I'm actively using it with Julia and Torch. It should work with any Jupyter kernel (and there are lots: https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/IPython-kernels-for-...).

In practice, different kernels have various oddities or holes in their implementation of the spec. I'm accommodating them when I can and posting issues when I can't. Let me know if you find a kernel that doesn't work!

bronson3• 11 years ago

Wow, that's a lot of languages!

How is the Ruby support? A Rails console in the file I'm writing sounds epic. No longer would I need to clumsily suck the interesting lines back out of irb history using copy/paste.

Looks active: https://github.com/SciRuby/iruby I'll have to try it.

outworlder• 11 years ago

I was thinking about the same thing yesterday! Glad to know it already exists.

My own Emacs feels... inadequate right know. But I guess something like this could be done for it too.

jscottmiller• 11 years ago

Nice work. Question for anyone using light table or similar environments on a day-to-day basis: does this statement-by-statement eval and output scale to larger projects? It makes a nice demo for contained scripts, in particular those working with a concrete dataset (image, samples). I have trouble imagining what it is like for larger, more abstract stretches of code.

willwhitney13• 11 years ago

I like to break my code up into little functions that are easy to test, so that flow works well for me.

Even more powerful, though, is autocomplete from the running environment. It means that (just like in the Chrome Dev Tools) when you start typing something, the autocomplete suggestions include all of the valid names that are defined. It really helps in navigating complex APIs like Torch: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e6hriw5quwct65a/Screenshot%202015-...

nawitus• 11 years ago

How powerful is autocomplete, when statically typed languages also provide it?

CyberDildonics• 11 years ago

Pretty awesome, this is something I had been thinking about since using light table and julia - live programming, visualization and bringing auto complete and live syntax checking to julia. Very cool! I think these methods if they work on a larger scale will ultimately be a better way to program.

rattray2• 11 years ago

Relatedly, I would love to see - what is this like with Django?

sherbondy• 11 years ago

Congrats on the release, Will! This would make for a killer default env for MIT's 6.815 course (http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/media-arts-and-sciences/mas-531-c...) (presently taught in Python). Also, ahem, I believe it is now time to JUPYTER ALL THE REPLS.

willwhitney13• 11 years ago

I'm looking forward to that Elixir kernel!

lambdaops2• 11 years ago

Yes please, Jupyter all the REPLs.

philipn• 11 years ago

For a vim version(ish) of this, be sure to check out vim-ipython: https://github.com/ivanov/vim-ipython

jarpineh2• 11 years ago

Yes! I like this very much. This is the favorite feature I used in LT (though I've wished to delve more in its architecture), I never really got the hang of external REPLs and browser sessions.

I recently tested Wallaby.js, which brings LT approach to testing. Now I wonder if the logic in Hydrogen could be extended to call module's tests and bring results just like the evaluation messages come. I think both immediate coding and testing might make coding more intuitive and reliable.

Is there an Atom to Jypyter bridge or something? How does Hydgoren and Atom communicate with Jypyter kernel?

willwhitney13• 11 years ago

Jupyter provides a spec for a ZeroMQ-based messaging API, which kernels in each language have implemented. Hydrogen acts as a client to those kernels the same way that the Jupyter frontend does, sending execution requests to the kernel and displaying responses.

I'd love to see live test results in Atom too! It would make it so much easier to be confident in your code's correctness.

jarpineh2• 11 years ago

Thank you. I managed to miss that when reading the first time. I'm currently learning testing with the TAP protocol [1], which might be simple enough to bring into Atom or Oxygen and also use in Jypyter languages. I know that Python and JavaScript supports it.

Just had another thought. Regular Jypyter kernel supports multiple connections. Have you tested connecting to Oxygen's Python kernel from Notebook or IPython session? I'm thinking that console + Atom is nicer environment for a coder than Notebook. Afterwards the session could then be saved as a Notebook.

Anyways, I must now find time to dig into this! I don't like to leave my editor just to look at code execute nor tests run, there is more than enough context switching in programming.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_Anything_Protocol

dimino• 11 years ago

As recently as today I thought IPython might be worth looking into -- I've heard too many good things about IPython to ignore it, but I didn't really know how to get started.

I guess I don't have that excuse any longer! My only concern is that my mind will have trouble adjusting to the evolving state of the "app" I'm working on -- it seems like values in lines above others change, which then change values at other places, not just below the code? Will take some getting used to.

knicholes• 11 years ago

While this is very cool, it seems like this type of development supplants TDD by running the intermediate results manually once and is forgotten.

saidajigumi• 11 years ago

I find this a surprising reaction, just because for so many devs I've known, it's common to keep a "sketchpad" interpreter open to mess about with code ideas. And these are all dedicated TDD folks. Perhaps if the dev(s) in question don't really understand TDD, but I think that's a cultural problem rather than a tooling problem.

In my experience, "getting" TDD is about two main things. First, internalizing what to test & why to test. (Fortunately, we've got a lot of help these days on the "how to test" front.) Second, having that moment when having tests makes your life-as-developer easier, or perhaps just possible. (Re: "possible", I recently upgraded a mature, legacy Rails 2.3 app to Rails 4.2. My blessings upon the devs prior to me who saw fit to create a comprehensive and well-maintained test suite. Without that, there would have needed to be a "throw it away and start afresh" discussion. Perhaps even project cancellation.)

lewisl9029• 11 years ago

I have a question for those who are either still using Light Table or have switched away from it:

I've been meaning to start a project in ClojureScript and was thinking of using Light Table as my editor. I vaguely recall seeing news about development of Light Table slowing down, but despite this, would you guys still recommend Light Table today for Clojure/ClojureScript development? In its current state, how does it compare to editors like Atom/Sublime and whatever other options that are out there for Clojure development?

mattdeboard4• 11 years ago

I would recommend Emacs or vim. I know for sure that both of these have really great development environments.

_halgari• 11 years ago

Support for ClojureScript recently got a lot better in Cursive Clojure. I recommend giving it a shot.

mattdeboard4• 11 years ago

I don't understand how people use Atom for Python. Indentation in language-python is broken.

https://github.com/atom/language-python/issues/64 https://github.com/atom/language-python/issues/22

There are also several syntax highlighting issues but those aren't deal-breakers like broken indentation.

I'm sympathetic, I help maintain elixir-mode for emacs. I know it's hard to get this stuff right. But all things considered, Atom is unusable for Python for me. I was using it for working with JS & React but now that web-mode seems to have ironed at many kinks, I'm back to Emacs.

chc2• 11 years ago

Python indentation in Emacs was awful for a long time too, wasn't it?

mattdeboard4• 11 years ago

Doesn't matter, it works now. This isn't a moral question about which project has had the fewest bugs in their respective lifetimes. It's a practical question about which mode gets auto-indentation right right now.

edit: I don't know the answer to your question. What I do know is that it's really hard to get indentation right in Emacs for languages with significant whitespace where new lines are the only marker, and I assume the same is true for TextMate (which Atom piggybacks on for indentation). I'm not an expert on emacs, emacs lisp or creating language modes for emacs, but I do have a decent amount of experience[1]. So when I say I'm sympathetic I mean it down in my bones.

But still, if an editor can't get auto-indentation right, it's a deal-breaker.

[1] https://github.com/elixir-lang/emacs-elixir/blob/master/elix...

seanp2k2• 11 years ago

Know off-hand if there is a fix for JS auto-indenting in the works? My atom seems to just indent everything one level more than the last, never out-denting back. This is something which I've found JetBrains IDEs to be really good at, but at this point Atom has so many useful / fun packages and is so easily extensible that I don't think I'll switch back any time soon.

If there's already a package (I know about FixMyJS which...sorta works...) which does this well, please share!

EDIT: rainbow parens would also be KILLER in Atom, but last time I looked it sounded like it was non-trivial to modify the colors like that.

billwilliams3• 11 years ago

Thank you for bringing us the future.

billwilliams3• 11 years ago

Any easy way to run remote kernels?

willwhitney13• 11 years ago

Right now it only works with local kernels, but that's on the to do list for sure.

billwilliams3• 11 years ago

Awesome, great work. This is one of those situations where I wish massive bribes were part of the open source ethos.

rando38262• 11 years ago

I clicked the link and then my browser (firefox) froze. Thanks.

rando38262• 11 years ago

And it repros.

bronson3• 11 years ago

There is nothing questionable on that page. Check your browser.

Animats• 11 years ago

Happened to me twice. Someone please click the "hostile code" box on that page.

hysan• 11 years ago

If you're on the latest Firefox (38), then it has been insanely crashy. Even with the 38.0.1 update that supposedly fixed a crash bug, the browser still crashes on a lot of websites. I'm not sure why Mozilla felt the need to push a suboptimal version out, but it is making me think of leaving Firefox again (been very unstable for me the past few versions).

ajtulloch• 11 years ago

Awesome - and very cool to see ITorch getting some love. Thanks very much @willwhitney.

spv• 11 years ago

This is cool but I am eagerly waiting for this though https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/307

Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom

Related Stories