Project roadmap

[Alexey Zlobin]

Hi,

I recently discovered Light Table and was very excited to see a novel approach to development environment. From the introduction video and first blog posts I concluded that the following are high-priority features:

1. Ubiquitous docs, both shown automatically and easily searchable.

2. File-free project representation.

3. Rich context for whatever is under focus. Like automatically shown sources of dependent functions, execution samples.

But current release, which I played for a couple hours, looks very different. It's a pure file-oriented editor, where docs, dependency sources and execution traces could be shown when called explicitly.

Is vision of Light Table changed to be an another hackable editor? Or it's just intermediate stage and final version will get more features from the original proposal?

Thanks,

Alexey.

[Jamie Brandon]

A lot of the things Chris wanted to do with Light Table turned out to be very difficult to hack into languages and tools that were not designed for it. Half-finished code which is missing the termination condition can loop forever and lock up the instarepl. Code objects rarely have unique names so mapping runtime data back to files often leads to nonsensical results. Evaluating function definitions causes side-effects so we can't do it automatically which means that code in the file gets out of sync with the state of the runtime.

The ideas of code as text-in-files and creating environments by side-effectful evaluation are both buried deep in current tools and they limit what we can do with Light Table. As a result most of the code in Light Table is dedicated to dealing with files and text rather than the actual problems users care about.

To solve this we are now focusing Light Table itself on being a hackable editor with quick feedback and at the same time we are working on a new language designed to enable the kind of rich tooling that we want. Our early prototypes have been surprisingly simple - turns out when you don't have to deal with parsing, files or shadowing a lot of things become easier. We've been quiet lately because we have our heads down trying to get this to the point where we can produce some really convincing demos. We have a lot of unusual ideas and it's going to take some really impressive results to persuade people.

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[Alexey Zlobin]

Thanks Jamie,

I really glad to hear that LT team don't give up with their great ideas. Looking forward to see these demos!

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Best regards,
Alexey Zlobin.

@cheatex