[steelmanning]

This is the same man, Chris Granger, that did a Kickstarter for Light Table, a so-called "next generation IDE," with promotional materials touting as new and revolutionary features that had been standard in IntelliJ, Visual Studio, and even Eclipse for years:

http://chrononsystems.com/blog/light-table-concept-vs-realit...

Light Table was also ultimately abandoned before completion.

Perhaps Granger should rein in his ambitions somewhat, or at least try to delegate more (assuming there are enough people to whom he can delegate)?

[dang]

This crosses into personal attack, which isn't ok at any time on Hacker News, let alone kicking someone when they're down. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this again.

[ibdknox]

Perhaps, but it's pretty easy to make judgements from the sideline about what people should or shouldn't do.

I was the PM on Visual Studio. I can assure the things I showed in Light Table weren't there. Nor were they in Eclipse, as I studied that as well. You can pick and choose any number of things from our work over the years and say "Hey, but this looks like that" - I'm sure it does, but the question is does it work like that? Does it enable you the way the things we showed did?

> Light Table was also ultimately abandoned before completion.

Unfortunately even after paying ourselves only just enough to live in the area (around 40% of what my peers were paid), we needed to find a way to eat. No software is ever done, but we had more than 40,000 people using it and Light Table was a stated influence on tools at Apple, Google, and Microsoft. We did our best. Was there more to do? Of course, there always is, but at some point we had to make the hard decision to leave LT in the hands of the community. I'm curious what direction you think we should've gone instead?

> Perhaps Granger should rein in his ambitions somewhat

Maybe, but at the same time, we had people willing to let us try. You paid literally nothing for access to our work, nor to the effects our research had on others, so I'm not sure why there's this much negativity here. We need people testing the fringes because where we are is so far from where we could be. Lots of things did work in Eve and there were cases where we were so much more efficient it hardly felt like we were "programming" at all anymore. We've shared everything we've done and we'll continue telling more people about it in the hope that others can benefit from what we've learned.

And yet you're the one acting hurt, while I'm the one having to shutdown the project. That's very different from the HN that rallied us to do our kickstarter in the first place - the one that encouraged innovation and trying to do crazy things in the off chance that they work. There's so much more to do and I sincerely hope HN doesn't become so cynical and demeaning that it's not worth sharing people's efforts here.

[necubi]

For whatever it's worth, I backed light table on kickstarter and as far as I'm concerned it was well worth the money. I got an interesting prototype editor which has had a big impact on the wider ecosystem (the swift playground comes particularly to mind). I've gotten to read your consistently interesting blog and watch you experiment with different pieces of the language design space.

I can't imagine how hard it must be to shut it down after all these years, but I know whatever comes next in PL and IDE design will owe your project a huge debt. Thank you for everything!

[azhenley]

Graduate school is a great place for "people testing the fringes."

My experimental code editor design, Patchworks [1], is one such example.

P.S. I'm a big fan of your work! Looking forward to hearing about your next project.

[1] http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N84177

[erikpukinskis]

> Graduate school is a great place for "people testing the fringes."

Testing, yes, but not exploring. Grad school gives you one experiment and then you have to start publishing. So if you have something you want to try out, with a direct implementation strategy and a clear set of possible outcomes, then you can do that at grad school.

If you want to try many things and iterate, grad school will not work well. You will be expected to publish digestible “learnings”, and so you will end up skewing your work towards ideas that are likely to produce compelling presentations.

There’s no good place to experiment, in either the corporate or academic world. Your best bet is to move between many domains, trying small ideas in context while also delivering value, and only ever doing your real Hail Mary experiments at home on your own dime.

[lazyasciiart]

Isn't the freedom from short term value basically the concept behind tenure?

[erikpukinskis]

If you don’t care if you have anyone in your lab, and you don’t have any expenses, you’re pretty free as a tenured faculty.

But if you want students, you need to find grants for them. And if you need materials/travel/services/etc for your research that’ll require grants too.

[BorisVSchmid]

Still using Light Table as my favorite light-weight IDE.

I hope things like https://clojuriststogether.org/ or possibly patreon will make clojure open source projects more sustainable for developers.

[didibus]

I'm happy for all the work you've put out, and I agree we need to try and experiment more and innovate, and so I found Eve was a more interesting experiment. That said LightTable had more potential for success and impact. I still dream for a more polished and full featured LightTable editor. A Jupyter notebook on steroid usable for generalized programming. ProtoREPL in Atom has picked up some of it, but overall there's just not the man resources behind any of these to really flesh them out and that's sad.

[m_mueller]

I’m kinda surprised Apple or MS didn’t jusy acquire or acquihire you by now. Especially the influence on Swift/playgrounds seems obvious.

[seanmcdirmid]

You are being a bit harsh. These were ambitious undertakings with high levels of risk going into them, which, I bet, were well known. I've struggled in this field for 10+ years now and there are lots of dark alley ways that end in walls. Then everyone constantly tells you this has already been done when, no, it really hasn't (at best, the technology is there but so piss poor designed that it isn't useful).

If you reign in your ambition, well, isn't that why innovation in the programming experience field is so stagnant (basically stuck at the Smalltalk level) in the first place? We should be free from disdain to take risks, possibly lose, with a chance of hitting it big.

[erikpukinskis]

As a side note, and as someone else working in this space, you do yourself a disservice by telling yourself work in this space is stagnant since SmallTalk.

It’s not that programming ergonomics are stagnant, it’s that all of the gains have been made by professionals. And the tooling is nearly impossible to leverage for a beginner environment because all of the assumptions of a pro developer are built in to their design.

The innovations are there, Heroku, Git, CSS, Markdown... these are all triumphs of programming ergonomics. They’re just all inevitably coopted by professional “Foundations” and amended to the maximum level a Pro developer can handle. JavaScript is almost useless for beginners now because the tooling is so complex, but full time front end devs can crank out HTTP packets like no ones business.

So you will need to watch those developments and lean on their ideas and some of the low level tooling if you ever hope to build a beginner environment. But you can’t use the tools themselves.

Still, if you start with SmallTalk you will fail. If Chris Granger and Bret Victor started their and failed, you will fail too, because those guys are rockstars.

You need to take the ideas being tested in the Pro tools and use them, without adopting the Pro implementations or even the interfaces. It’s or easy.

[seanmcdirmid]

None of those are interesting experiences beyond the command line. They represent exactly the stagnant thinking that we are fighting against. Especially GIT, it could have come out in the 70s with the interface it relies on. It makes me sad that people see this as progress.

It doesn’t take a rockstar to make progress here, and anyways, I’ve been relatively successful on the academic side (e.g. just got a 10 year influential paper award for my 2007 live programming paper). I don’t think Bret Victor failed so much as lost interest, and he accomplished a great deal in getting people interested in this area again. Chris hasn’t really failed either, he is still young. And let’s not forget all the ex-HARCers...

Also, not all of us see this as a make programming more accessible problem; e.g. that’s not my thing, I really want to improve programming en masse. But we all agree the existing way is a dead end and we need to experiment ei5h radically different approaches.

[PyComfy]

Interesting experiences beyond the command line are game development tools; Each iteration try to make the barrier between artists/content creators and programmers thinner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXSKGYQvZsI

[Firadeoclus]

Indeed. Also interesting is a look at games themselves, especially those that show a long trajectory from beginner to experienced player with significantly different interaction patterns between the two groups.

It would seem that practically no programmer's tool has ever received the attention to interface detail that is common in the best games.

[erikj]

How is Markdown innovative exactly?

[infinite8s]

It took ideas from the 70s, dropped the interesting parts, and was hailed as a revolutionary approach to marking up documents. Ie, the past 30 years of computing have been about narrowing the interface between programmer and computer to the equivalent of a straw (everything as text!) and then try to build an entire system around that.

[dman]

+1 - Watching from the sidelines I admire the work both from you and Chris. It is incredibly hard to move away from the current local maximum because of network effects.

[infinite8s]

Not only network effects, but path dependence due to the hegemony of our current hardware/software stack.

[bachmeier]

This is (in principle, at least) why we have public funding of basic research.

[seanmcdirmid]

Which right now is mostly going to the deep learning train :(. There are some academics working in this area right now, Ravi Chugh, Phillip Guo, to name a couple.

[didibus]

Isn't generalized AI and even more ambitious long term goal though? Why program anything, just tell the computer what you want and he'll make it for you.

[seanmcdirmid]

That's funny, since Engelbart's work in the mother of all demos was seen as irrelevant by much of the CS community at the time because they thought generalized AI was just around the corner! After a 2 or 3 AI winters, they changed their minds.

Generalized AI is like practical fusion, always 20 years away. I mean, it will come eventually, but until then...there is still value in making humans better.

[steelmanning]

> You are being a bit harsh

I know, and I rewrote my post several times before submitting it, trying to minimize the harshness. But the pattern with Granger is pretty obvious, isn't it? Grandiose ambitions, over-commitment, and a resulting failure to ship.

[seanmcdirmid]

There have been plenty of people out there with grand visions who tried and failed the first few times. Then either they give up and tone down their visions, or they keep trying and perhaps eventually succeed.

LightTable and Eve are still very influential and inspiring even if they aren't successful. I am personally glad they existed, as they provide experience and lessons for future efforts.

[flukus]

> There have been plenty of people out there with grand visions who tried and failed the first few times.

Most of them a con men, selling something they know will never work, especially on kickstarter and the like.

This was nothing unique, it's something people have been trying to do since computers were invented and it has failed every single time. COBOL was conceived with the idea that people in other disciplines would be able to do their own programming.

When there is every reason to think you will fail and you ask people for money to try then you start to look a lot like those con men.

[pbiggar]

The problem I have with your statement is that you are attributing something to somebody about which you know nothing, based on almost no information.

A less asshole-y phrasing would be "I wonder if he had reduced his ambitions somewhat, it might have had more chance to succeed".

[felipelemos]

And what's the problem with that? I think he (and everybody else) is free to have whatever dream they want, since they did not try to deceive others.

[portlander12345]

It’s called research.

[rntz]

Your comment is inconsistent with itself.

If LightTable's features "had been standard in IntelliJ, Visual Studio, and even Eclipse for years", how is that evidence that Granger et al were being overly ambitious? Wouldn't it suggest exactly the opposite?

Vice-versa, if LightTable was overly ambitious, wouldn't that mean it tried to do things that were (too far) beyond the scope of existing technology?

[saywatnow]

My opinion is almost the opposite: I find Granger's ambitious ideas and presentations stimulating, and I like that they're out there to inspire people to imagine more and experiment more agressively.

I wish his audiences were a bit less credulous though. Experiments like Light Table and Eve are just that: interesting and potentially useful explorations of design space, but as unlikely as anything else to radically change the discipline of programming overnight.

[gojomo]

Can you describe the right-sized ambitions and effective delegation practices that have served you well in your career, perhaps with examples of the resulting successes?

[steelmanning]

When you have a failed Kickstarter under your belt, that's a good indication you need to aim lower.

[ModernMech]

How was Light Table a failed kickstarter? It got funded and Chris delivered exactly what he said he would. You can go and use Light Table today. The reason he stopped working on it was the realization that his ultimate vision for Light Table is something exactly like Eve, and would be impossible with languages like JS, Pyhton, and Clojure.

[dang]

Since this is your third such comment, it seems that you created this account for personal attack. That's obviously a bannable offense, so I've banned the account. Please don't create HN accounts to break the site guidelines with. We like HN users who like Smalltalk, but not being an asshole is more important.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[gojomo]

Can you provide pointers to your successful kickstarters, or other projects where lowering your aim created success?

[murukesh_s]

He raised a seed funding for a programming language, that itself deserves credit. I think with your attitude, many innovators would have quit from their first or second try? Get a life buddy.