Call for discussion about editor

[Yoko Harada]

Hi All,

This is a crosspost to ClojureBridge Workshop and clojurebridge-curriculum. Please go to https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/clojurebridge-curriculum for further discussion.

I heard voices of frustration on editor. I think most of or all of workshops use LightTable as an editor. At the very beginning, we started with Nightcode, then, switched to LightTable. As far as I remember, the reason was: 1. became OSS product, 2: more beginner friendly

It's been a while, more workshops have been organized, also we got more experiences. Given that, I'd like to hear your thoughts, opinions or suggestions about the editor. If there's better choice, we should switch to something else.

Is LightTable the best choice or not? How do you think?

- Yoko

[Sean Corfield]

On May 18, 2015, at 7:34 PM, Yoko Harada <yo...@cognitect.com> wrote:

I heard voices of frustration on editor. I think most of or all of workshops use LightTable as an editor. At the very beginning, we started with Nightcode, then, switched to LightTable. As far as I remember, the reason was: 1. became OSS product, 2: more beginner friendly

It's been a while, more workshops have been organized, also we got more experiences. Given that, I'd like to hear your thoughts, opinions or suggestions about the editor. If there's better choice, we should switch to something else.

Is LightTable the best choice or not? How do you think?

TL;DR: I can’t recommend LightTable any more.

I was one of the early advocates for LightTable and I think overall it was a good choice for the first round of workshops. Unfortunately, development of LightTable stalled some time ago, and when OS X Yosemite came out, LightTable became very difficult to justify because of problems with the underlying node-webkit implementation: repeated freezes, very laggy user experience.

The LightTable team started working on a version based on atom-shell instead, which solves the OS X problems, but that was ages ago and there has still been no stable release based on it. I was using the atom-shell branch, built from source, for a while but it was fairly buggy.

My team at work had pretty much migrated from Emacs to LightTable before Yosemite came out and were fairly happy with the shift — but that evaporated after we upgraded to Yosemite and we recently all switched back "officially" to Emacs (some of the team switched back quite a while before I finally did). We decided to standardize on Emacs Live for our configuration, on the grounds that it’s fairly comprehensive, it’s easy to install and get up and running on Mac/Win, and it’s reasonably well maintained. It’s still Emacs, tho’…

What next?

Probably the best way to move the discussion forward is to list all the possible options we have for Clojure development and eliminate the ones that won’t work for the target audience and see what’s left…

* NightCode

* Cursive/IntelliJ

* CCW/Eclipse

* Vim with various plugins

* Emacs with various setups

* … what else?

Sean Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN
An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/

"Perfection is the enemy of the good."
-- Gustave Flaubert, French realist novelist (1821-1880)

[Yoko Harada]

Thanks Sean for the great insight.

I use Emacs and cider. But, this combination is definitely not for a beginner. I think Vim is also not for a beginner.

So, the choices would be:

* NightCode

* Cursive/Intellij

* CCW/Eclipse

* LightTable (with additional instruction?)

* ... (something else)

- Yoko

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[Robert D Pitts]

fwiw – even as a seasoned programmer (who never used full blown IDEs, always vim/emacs), I find cursive a bit overwhelming and confusing. Could just be me.

Nightcode seems like a good fit – I seem to recall Zach Oakes saying it was designed with teaching younger non-programmers in mind, no? Just spent a little bit of time navigating around a project with it and using some of the built-in templates. 

My only concern would be that it seems like a bit of a resource hog during builds and such.

On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 10:09 AM, Nola Stowe <mrnic...@gmail.com> wrote:

Especially for new programmers there is a lot to learn in one day. Aside from setting font size in light table, it is pretty straight forward. 

Maybe you could offer Cursive as an optional install for seasoned programmers?

On Wednesday, May 20, 2015, Daniel Compton <daniel.com...@gmail.com> wrote:

We're looking to put on a Workshop in Auckland NZ (more details and requests for help will be forthcoming) and are considering offering Cursive as an option. It is extremely bulletproof and stable, something I haven't seen as much when watching and teaching new people using Lighttable at Clojure Meetups.

There is definitely more weight to IntelliJ, but I don't think it's insurmountable for users. I'm curious to hear others thoughts though, I haven't been a beginner for a while so I may be underestimating the difficulty for new users.

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[Katherine Fellows]

What Robert said, basically.

I wouldn't recommend Cursive/IntelliJ or CCW/Eclipse at all for beginners, as the interfaces are too confusing. Also, they're heavy and difficult to run on older or lower-end machines; even using them on my MacBook Air is impractical, and it's only a year and a half old.

So, the only option I can see is either sticking with LightTable or moving to Nightcode--that or using some other text editor like Sublime, although that wouldn't abstract away the terminal at all.

Still, I'm not familiar enough with Nightcode to comment on whether that's a better or worse option than LightTable. It's true that LightTable is confusing and doesn't have many contributors, but Nightcode has even fewer--though, perhaps it's worth trading that for a codebase with a lower barrier of entry?

To be honest, we've basically been talking about using something other than LightTable since we started using LightTable, and no one has really picked up the torch. I'm definitely up for using something else, but I'd want to see someone feel excited enough about using another editor that they spend a nontrivial amount of time using that other editor, then write some new docs/lesson plans accordingly.

...which has yet to happen.

Also, by "nontrivial amount of time," I mean "try to poke around the innards of the editor." I spent a hack week at work figuring out how to build LightTable plugins, for example--does anyone else care enough about Nightcode that they're willing to do something similar? Genuine question.

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[Katherine Fellows]

Also, relatedly: It's definitely a fair criticism to say that LightTable is laggy, etc. in certain situations, because it is--but, how does Nightcode perform under similar circumstances?

I understand that Sean's team was using LightTable as their main editor and had to switch back to Emacs, but Nightcode is also not a replacement for Emacs, sooooo. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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kf

[Sean Corfield]

On May 20, 2015, at 9:18 AM, Katherine Fellows <k...@kpf.me> wrote:

Also, relatedly: It's definitely a fair criticism to say that LightTable is laggy, etc. in certain situations, because it is--but, how does Nightcode perform under similar circumstances?

I used Nightcode at work for a week way back when we had this discussion and my only real issue was limited functionality in a real-world work environment (it’s improved a lot since then based on posts to the Nightcode Reddit but I haven’t tried it recently). It was certainly easy to get up and running with and it’s consistent across platforms. I have not tried it on low-end / old machines, however.

I understand that Sean's team was using LightTable as their main editor and had to switch back to Emacs, but Nightcode is also not a replacement for Emacs, sooooo. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Indeed. LightTable wasn’t entirely either, but it was good enough for a real-world work environment with a decent set of plugins added. Nightcode now has Git integration so I might try it again…

Sean

[Yoko Harada]

This is just the info since we are on a middle of discussion.

We still have the very first version of Nightcode setup for ClojureBridge, https://github.com/ClojureBridge/getting-started/blob/master/nightcode.md

The document may be outdated. But we may use this as a base if we choose Nightcode.

- Yoko

[Nola Stowe]

Consider what code we are writing in the workshop vs what your work code looks like .... Work code probably longer, more intense. We had no problems with light table at Austin clojure workshop. However our workshop was aimed at developers who had mostly all macs.

[John D. Hume]

We didn't have serious issues, but there were definitely some problems. The little bubbles showing values flowing through a function would stack out past the right margin (with old values never clearing). Other times it would just get into a bad state we didn't know how to save and we'd have them restart. I'm pretty sure we saw both of those happen to Mac users.

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015, 12:04 AM Nola Stowe <no...@rubygeek.com> wrote:

Consider what code we are writing in the workshop vs what your work code looks like .... Work code probably longer, more intense. We had no problems with light table at Austin clojure workshop. However our workshop was aimed at developers who had mostly all macs.