Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Light Table is a free, customizable, functional, and open-source IDE with a modern User Interface, plugin support, command pane, and connection manager
I'll stick with (g)vim personally but there's probably a few of you who'll find this interesting enough, if only to rag on it in the comments.
Source: https://www.fossmint.com/light-table-next-generation-open-source-ide-editor/
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Light Table - A Next-Generation Open-Source and Customizable IDE
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(Score: -1, Troll) by aristarchus on Monday December 04 2017, @04:20AM (8 children)
Ah, submitted by TMB! So of course accepted. Even though he is an alt-right coder. Shame, Soylent! Shame!
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @04:51AM (6 children)
You accuse him of being alt-right, which implies you are politically left, and you people can't turn off. TMB at least talks something other than politics for a change.
(Score: 1, Funny) by aristarchus on Monday December 04 2017, @05:11AM (3 children)
Are you so sure? I have to admit, I first thought he was going on about DarkTable, but that is a photo editing suite. Light table, for light skinned people, only? Fricking neo-nazis! Oh, I am so far right that I make your commie uncle look like a Ron Paul supporter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @06:04AM
Careful, aristarchus is a slippery eel! He has connections throughout the internets. You mod him down at your peril! Do you want to sleep with the fishes?
(Score: 0, Funny) by aristarchus on Monday December 04 2017, @07:27AM (1 child)
Ow! Slick! First an offtopic mod, and then, then, an over-rated mod? How is this even possible? Unless, possibly, it was someone with an intimate understanding of the entire structure of SoylentNews, say, a code-monkey who gets his submissions accepted, because, you know, he writes the code! The right-wing, Chocktaw code that excludes real Cherokees, and allows Washita scum to dominate SoylentNews. Traitor to his clan, traitor to his tribe, loves him some Trump Tiny Hands. Pocahantus, of the Narragansett, as well as Sacajawea, of the Shoshone, would spit in your face. Apple! (oh, for non-natives: red on the outside, white on the inside, native american verision of an "oreo".)
(Um, those of you who are not Native American, except for the bigot Runaaway2000, can ignore this post. Unless you are interested in why Trump hosting the Navajho "Code Talker" veterans in front of a portrait of the worst president before George II, and before Trump himself, Andrew Jackson (ptt'oh), was a complete and unforgiveable insult. In that case, I just want to point out, you know, scalping was introduced by the British, barbarians that they were. But it may not be entirely offbase in the case of the Donald. I mean, that rug, decorating any teepee, wigwam, or condo, would truly be a coup de grâce ?)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @11:20AM
So, the left-of-left-wing psychotic has insomnia again, he's bored, so he gets on Soylent to stir some shit, pointlessly. Typical. Crawl back under your bridge, troll.
(Score: 5, Funny) by TheRaven on Monday December 04 2017, @09:45AM (1 child)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Tuesday December 05 2017, @09:04AM
well, if he's an alt-right coder, that means left alignment, it's the alternative right, i.e. mirrored. We're talking about the same thing really...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday December 04 2017, @03:02PM
Are you suggesting he would ignore perfectly good data structures such as Leftist Trees [wikipedia.org]?1,2,3
1CSC 378: Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis: Leftist Trees [toronto.edu]
2Leftist Tree / Leftist Heap [geeksforgeeks.org]
3Leftist Heap Visualization [usfca.edu]
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @05:09AM (3 children)
From the article:
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @08:08AM
It's an error in the journalistic piece. The software is under the MIT license.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @08:46AM (1 child)
Closed source.... now a feature!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @01:09PM
Quality journalism... now a memory!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by ataradov on Monday December 04 2017, @05:11AM (1 child)
This is another chrome-based toy written in some goofy language. I'll pass.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday December 04 2017, @03:09PM
Clojure is quite a nice language actually.
I tried Light Table sometime back. I think more than a year ago. But I was comfortable enough in Eclipse and couldn't overcome inertia1. Too set in my ways.
1or dementia from having tried Perl in my younger daze.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cubancigar11 on Monday December 04 2017, @05:27AM (1 child)
Let me make a guess, it is based on node.js? What's with the kids trying reinvent everything with broken languages? There has to be some sociological/psychological phenomenon underneath this.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Marand on Monday December 04 2017, @06:08AM
More like "First Light Table, then Atom and Brackets." Light Table showed up in 2012, two years before Atom or Brackets, and it predates the framework (Electron) used to create them. It was far enough ahead of the others that it may even have influenced the creation of them.
Sort of. It's using Electron (and node-webkit prior to that), yes, but it's not yet another JavaScript product. It's written in Clojure, a lisp that's made to be "parasitic", I guess you could say. It's a hosted language that can run on the CLR (.NET) or JVM platforms, or be compiled to Javascript, with the ability to perform interop with whatever host platform it's on. Generally much nicer than dealing with JS, C#, or Java directly.
For Clojure, there's actually some logic to using Electron as the target for user applications. JVM Clojure has a fairly hefty start-up time and using the CLR isn't very popular outside of Windows, leaving ClojureScript (the Clojure-to-JS variant) as the "best" option for many types of program. If you need faster startup time, for example, you're better off using ClojureScript, whereas you'd use JVM Clojure for long-running tasks, ones that need parallelism, etc. In the case of Light Table, it uses the node/webkit base to provide some interesting real-time updating features. Plus, as despised as Electron UIs are, the alternative would likely have been to use Clojure and Swing. I don't recall OpenJFX being a good option back when LT showed up.
That said, if you're just ideologically opposed to anything related to node or javascript, you won't be happy with it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Marand on Monday December 04 2017, @05:41AM (3 children)
I used Light Table for a while before going back to emacs and it's a pretty nice editor. In a way, it's basically "emacs, but modern": extensible editor using a Lisp dialect (Clojure, or more accurately ClojureScript) for both the program and configuration. Uses ctrl-space by default to bring up a "console" you can use to call functions, like M-x in emacs, built-in package management for extension, and the config files are primarily Clojure vectors (arrays) though I believe you can use s-expressions and call functions within them to generate those vectors. Probably the most interesting thing it did was introduce the "instaREPL", a variation of REPL use that evaluates expressions as they're typed out and shows their return values in-line, alongside the code.
So, for example, if you type (+ 2 2) in a buffer or file that has instaREPL enabled, it evaluates that and shows it alongside, like (+ 2 2) => 4. It was supported for a handful of languages like Clojure and JavaScript, with others available via plugins, and was really cool. I've gotten something close in emacs for some modes, but not quite as seamless. It also could do live updates for certain languages, so that changes made in the file were shown real-time in an output area, though this was primarily for browser-related work like html and javascript.
It's not all rosy, though; first, and most obviously, it's yet another browser-based editor. It predates Electron and was originally built on node-webkit, but has since been ported to Electron. Either way, though, it's still essentially an editor wrapped up in a standalone Chromium instance, so it's going to be heavier as a result. It does, at least, use this base well, allowing use of the webkit frames for things like the aforementioned real-time output.
The other problem is less of a technical one and more of a people problem. It was originally created, after a successful Kickstarter program, by someone that later abandoned the project and moved on to...something I'm not sure how to describe, a mix of IDE, language, and documentation called Eve [eve-lang.com]. When he did, he made sure to tell everyone how LT wasn't the programming future he wanted it to be, and to check out his new project that would be! It wasn't quite as bad as Elop's burning platform memo when he joined Nokia, but it still pissed off plenty of people that gave him money, because he did part of the work and then went "lol nope failed experiment" and bailed on it, leaving it to the community to continue the work and fix the problems. That means there hasn't been as much development interest as it deserves, so improvements have been slow the past few years.
The people still involved seem to care about it and are still trying to work on it, so hopefully the reappearance of it in discussions is an indication of renewed interest.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @08:46PM (1 child)
Did Granger fail to deliver any of the promises in the Kickstarter? If he fulfilled all of the original goals - and I think he did - then what's wrong with him abandoning the project?
I tried LightTable, but for better or for worse (mostly for worse) I pay my mortgage working on Java. If I could convince an employer to pay me for working on Clojure, I might have used it more often. I may install it again for fun, so I'm glad it came up.
I looked at Eve, but I'm not sure how intuitive it is. Might be fun to try, though. One of the things I give Granger for is being able to accept when he screwed up, and to give his work to real people and watch them use it and recognize what he got wrong. He was the manager for Visual Studio at Microsoft for a while, then he built Light Table, and now this. Eve may never amount to anything, but it might actually end up being pretty cool.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Monday December 04 2017, @09:22PM
No clue, I wasn't involved in it. Doesn't matter, though, because it still gave a bad impression to a lot of people, because it still had plenty of bugs and polish needed when he went "k, I'm out, have fun fixing it!" That had a real effect on development and support, and when it happened a lot of the momentum went away. It's a nice editor, though, and like I said, hopefully development is picking up steam again. It's been long enough now that maybe it can start being seen as a community project, instead of the abandoned experiment of one person.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:26AM
The main question is, how hackable is it?
The main power of Emacs is that you can easily step through with a debugging or read the documentation or source code for literally everything. Every bug fix or new feature I ever needed to add to Emacs took 15-30 minutes, far less than I anticipated each time.
If the editor isn't easy enough to extend that you can reprogram it while you are doing actual work (i.e., not having to set aside a block of time specifically dedicated to writing plugins or scripts), then it will never replace Emacs.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2, Troll) by aristarchus on Monday December 04 2017, @05:54AM
Sorry, all. I did not know that this was based on node.js. Oh, the Hugh Grant Manatee! But seriously, is this what we have been reduced to? Buzzard? Account for your sins, you mangy bird of carrion.
(Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Monday December 04 2017, @07:33AM (1 child)
Well the watch variables is a very cool integration. I do not use this nodejs languages nor anything related, and I admit I am clueless when I see a piece of code of it.
Coming back, an integration with gdb and the IDE with this watch variable mechanism would be very interesting. Is there anything similar of Netbeans or some other IDE?
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday December 04 2017, @10:02AM
Kinda: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19922013/eclipse-cdt-mingw-gdb-watching-objects-while-debugging [stackoverflow.com]
Any other day I'd make fun of people needing gdb front-ends but I've been having a hard time getting a grip on my factor/forth stacks recently so...
compiling...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @08:10AM (8 children)
Lately, a "modern" IDE has meant a slow IDE. Is this the case here? From Visual Studio to all the Chrome-based IDEs that have been popping up lately, slowness seem to be the defining "feature".
And "Light Table"? Sounds like a photo manager / editor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @02:38PM
That's because it's got a parser running on the source files in the background so that it can do stuff like syntax highlighting, code completion, etc. It gets worse with "dynamic typed" languages because it has to guess types from the context.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday December 04 2017, @03:49PM (5 children)
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Monday December 04 2017, @06:48PM (4 children)
QtCreator is pretty fast though. Much faster than Visual Studio at syntax evaluation. The integration with gdb is pretty good too.
All I had to know was that this new IDE appears to target Electron. Unmitigated trash.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday December 04 2017, @08:20PM (3 children)
Most likely because there isn't a stack of language VM's, web browsers, and a million other libs to drag in while the CPU burns through the entire mess.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @08:44PM (2 children)
Very true. Modern IDEs deploy dozens of threads in the background to all the parsing/coordination work, and I thought managing that on JVM was a feet, but stick that on top of dynamic scripting language platform, it negates all the multi-core hardware performance advances of the last decade.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Monday December 04 2017, @11:02PM (1 child)
Plenty of dynamic languages use multiple cores, even Clojure. The problem is the massive software stack in between the user and the actual application is a bloated mess. In the case of QtCreator, it's all c++ so the heavy lifting is done closer to the metal in native machine code using native libraries for graphics and everything else. That's about as fast as you can get.
These newer IDE's are self contained cross-platform client-server web applications. They want cross-platform portability so that rules out compiled languages leaving us with VM languages. Those languages are slow by themselves unless they use native libraries via foreign function interfaces or other native interfaces to do the heavy lifting. But once again you have the portability problem so you have to stay within the VM. Okay, figured out how to run the code, now how do we display it on various operating systems or CPU arch's WITHOUT compiling anything? Answer: use a web browser. This necessitates integrating a web server into the back end code so the browser can talk to it. Most likely that happens via a web framework because someone has done it already so we drag in a shit load of dependencies. But wait! Clojure doesn't run in a browser so we have to write the web front end in HTMl, CSS and JS.
In the end you have not one, but two VM's running two different halves of your code written in multiple languages. It's sloppy, lazy, wasteful, patently absurd and needs to stop.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:05PM
I'd say that "sloppy, lazy, wasteful" depends on the implementation. Yes, if you pull in all the frameworks and cobble them together like most client-server code these days, you will end up with a bloated mess. But it's possible to do things better than that. The problem is that it relies on the skill of the developer.
It's possible, though, to create an application exactly as you describe and make it fast. Modeling your desktop app like an HTTP API-driven web app has the advantage of requiring everything to be asynchronous and (at the transmission level) stateless. These two limitations will make any application enormously more stable, and if you know how to work within them, parallelizable as well. You just need the discipline to leave the heavy frameworks on the shelf.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @08:43PM
The choice of name was deliberate, the idea was that it would borrow ideas from real light tables. It's not clear to me if he got it working, but there are demos of the idea in some of the videos.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @10:56AM (4 children)
Mercury goes screwy in the heavens
- and we're having the worst thread on this board that I've ever seen.
Would you people please chill and stop it with the ad-hominems?
Light-table too, as browsing the blog and forum will quickly show,
regressed and seems to have gone dark from complexity and inexperience.
I used to think I wanted it for refactoring, but, nah, Emacs wins it all.
and for those thinking node/clojurescript are toys.. better get some
some brainz people. give an hr: http://www.parens-of-the-dead.com/ [parens-of-the-dead.com]
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday December 04 2017, @12:26PM (1 child)
I sincerely concur, please stop the ad-hominems!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday December 04 2017, @03:26PM
Your wish is granted. We'll start ad-ovium-versutus attacks. Pleased now?
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday December 04 2017, @03:16PM (1 child)
Node is just a VM like the Java VM. It's JavaScript that sucks. Although let's not be unfair to Java - the JVM is much better than the Node environment. Which raises the question of why, if you're writing Clojure, you don't just compile to the JVM instead of Node.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday December 05 2017, @01:55AM
Start up time, UI choices. Java isn't popular for GUI applications because using the JVM means (usually) Swing or (less commonly) JavaFX. Also, for whatever reason, ClojureScript has a noticeably faster start-up time than Clojure on the JVM, which is important for some things.
That said, I'd still rather use JVM Clojure. Sure, it's a good bit slower to start by default, but you can tune the start time quite a bit, and I'd rather deal with JFX or Swing than the insane node and JS ecosystems.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday December 04 2017, @03:13PM
I tried LightTable a while ago. It seemed to be an inferior product compared to something like Sublime, not to mention that it's built for a specific context I don't usually work in. Open source is a big positive, but this isn't even the best open source editor.
That crown, for me at least, goes to Visual Studio Code. Which is surprisingly open source, and unlike every other open source editor is actually faster and more stable than Sublime.
Of course, I had to turn off Microsoft's idea of helpful auto-complete ("IntelliSense"). But I can tell that the editor is built well because it loads almost as fast as Notepad despite having most of the features (like auto-complete) of a much heavier editor like Visual Studio or IntelliJ.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Monday December 04 2017, @05:30PM (5 children)
So, it's another clone of Sublime. Just like Atom, Visual Studio Code, and possibly others.
Why?
And what's with this fad of providing config options in barely documented JSON? Strikes me as just being too lazy to provide preference screens.
(Score: 5, Funny) by LoRdTAW on Monday December 04 2017, @08:23PM
What are you like, 35? Go home and use your atari, Grandpa. The web browser is the computer you old geezer so it's all about web. And what's a documented?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday December 05 2017, @02:02AM (2 children)
You can blame emacs for starting that fad, because LT uses Clojure data structures (vectors, keywords, maps, etc.) in the same way that Emacs configuration is in s-expressions. There's no JSON to be found, unlike VSCode/Atom/etc. It only looks like "barely documented JSON" because you don't know anything about JSON or Clojure. :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @08:48PM (1 child)
Emacs at least has a dynamic customize UI for editing all of those settings. (Don't know if this does, but in emacs you don't have to edit all your settings in the raw lisp.)
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday December 05 2017, @11:54PM
True, but it's also older than me, so it's had plenty of time to add things like that that it didn't have originally ;)
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:15PM
Because tools like Sublime are absolutely essential to software development. Without it, your choices for editing the little scripts that litter everything are:
If Sublime was good enough, there would be no clones. But Sublime is closed-source and development is basically ended. It is not a living product like Atom, Visual Studio Code, LightTable, Notepad++, Geany, Editra, Lime, and others which can always be resurrected because they are all open source.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?