[dibbeke]

Ah, another ad hominem! Let me reply with an ad hominem:

Would you translate your statement into:

"It is difficult to get Prashant Deva to understand something, when the salary of Prashant Deva depends upon his not understanding it"?

No? Then don't make your senseless statement. Please argue his statement instead.

Or, maybe you're not a computer scientist, because you're not able to comprehend and participate in a normal discussion?

[Rage]

Well, Eclipse is slow, crashes, has a lot of features but doesn't really do anything nicely (javadoc integration is damn awful tu use). More features doesn't mean better.

What i like about LighTables is that it seems to have few features, but do them well. It has a nice clean UI (even if it's just mockup, i don't think it needs anything else) and the UX seems nice too from what i understood.

Maybe what you didn't understood is that it's NOT an IDE for computer scientists : it's more aimed to visual programmer, webdev, or gamedev, creativecoders. People that want to do both design and coding.

BTW : i just trashed Eclipse, not anyone. I still use it because it's still the best ide for javacoding (even if i haven't done any in a while), which, to me, isn't really flattering for the state of coding IDEs.

[dibbeke]

Eclipse needs a good amount of memory and recently, unfortunately, has a tendency to crash. Most of the features can be disabled; the UI can be reconfigured to your liking. Btw, I generally disable the javadoc view and just F3 to the location to see the code and docs together (docs are often wrong anyways).

The problem with mockups is that they haven't touched reality yet: there is always so much detail you don't see at the start.

[Rage]

yup, but eclipse is too big for me i think, i'm not really a fan. I prefer to user sublime text with completion help that run instantly.

[andos]

I would translate it exactly like that, though it's actually not ad hominem but ad humanitatem, really. We are all biased creatures, as others have pointed out. I think the critique is biased, I think it is biased because the author put a lot of effort in his (otherwise awesome) Java product, and therefore I quoted Upton Sinclair.

For instance, he argues that it would take a lot of working around to provide instant feedback for code with side-effects, but isn't that obvious? The LightTable video doesn't claim it magically mocks every external component or does some other fancy stuff. That doesn't make the feature less useful, especially in a language like Clojure, which was used for the demo. For me, that part reads much like "since it ws so hard to create Chronon, one cannot pretend the LightTable features are so easy to implement. Let me prove that by putting LightTable in the context of my product."

There was — deliberately, yes — a bit of snide and a lot of cynicism in my post, but I hope to have made it clear that it was not without a reason (for the cynicism, at least).

[cgray4]

If a scientist is funded by the petroleum industry and publishes articles saying that climate change isn't happening, is his connection relevant?

If a doctor is funded by a drug company and publishes articles saying that the company's drugs are good, is her connection relevant?

Even the best scientists can be biased, and being aware of the biases can help one decide how much attention to give arguments. If Prashant Deva is biased by his experience and funding against the technology that he is critiquing, then that is relevant information to me and many other people who read his critique. To suppress that information, as you seem to be trying to do, would be a blow against transparency. In my opinion, that would be a bad thing.

[dibbeke]

In peer-review, the original authors are redacted, so the peer-review committee's bias is reduced (not eliminated, of course).

When a scientist is funded by the petrol industry, but has a long history of showing sound scientific results, I'd give him my full attention. Perhaps my reading of his results would be biased negatively if I would know his research is funded by a certain industry.

When that doctor publishes an article on his new drugs, I question where it is published, whether there have been similar results by other researchers, whether similar approaches have seen widespread application, whether the author can connect the results logically with other research, whether there has been a good peer review and whether I can understand his results. These metrics give me confidence. The funding of the researcher might interest me, but another researcher with a perfect clean sheet might get his funding in a more black-market way. They say you should follow the money, but generally it is difficult, if not impossible, to find the trail.

This means I question almost everything I read and unfortunately have little certainties. Then again "Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself." -- Wittgenstein