[ticking]

It's good that LT is finally acknowledged to have failed as "the uber clojure IDE". It's architecture is horrible, and its catering too much to other languages.

Once it's dead the space it frees up can be filled again by something that actually works.

[seanmcdirmid]

Failed experiments can lead to great results down the road. I'm predicting that LT was probably totally worth it.

[ticking]

LT didn't bring any new inventions, emacs, self, morphic, CL, they've all done some aspect of it 30 years earlier.

LT has shown however that you can make a load of money of kickstarter without delivering a product, but people will still throw money at you for building the next big unfinished thing (see their new pet project with a broken architecture called EVE).

[seanmcdirmid]

This is why academia sucks so badly: they think because some features were released in some projects that "there is nothing new under the sun." Bull! There is still a lot to be explored and none of those projects you listed contain much of the live programming story at all (Chris Hancock at MIT did flogo II, which is more relevant than the Lisp and smalltalk projects).

To make any progress at all, we just need to stop listening to those who are living in the glory of a past that wasn't so great anyways.

[ticking]

They didn't contain much of the live programming story?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox5P7QyL774

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ka4KY7TMTU

[lmm]

But LT hasn't achieved either half. It's not an innovative research project. And it's not a polished consumer product.

[zubairq]

Did any of you guys even use Light Table. I bet you didn't as it did some pretty amazing stuff that no other IDE could touch!

[ticking]

Yes, I also dug into its codebase. Have you actually used Self for example?

[nhangen]

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. Perhaps the truth here is harsh, but it's the truth nonetheless. Perhaps not the whole truth, but at least part of it.

[coldtea]

The part about LT overpromising and underdelivering is true.

The rest is not true, and said with a partisan rudeness to top, mostly like someone wanting to piss over LT and Chris than a genuine criticism.

It starts: "It's good that LT is finally acknowledged to have failed as "the uber clojure IDE".

It never said it was the "the uber clojure IDE", not even used any words to this effect. It was an experiment in IDEs in general, and in fact the very landing page of the project writes:

"When we released our first blog post about Light Table back in April of 2012, it was just a new concept for an IDE. Thanks to the community, our concept was pushed to become a reality."

Moreover the parent continues:

>It's architecture is horrible, and its catering too much to other languages.

"Catering too much to other languages"? What does that even mean? Did anybody signed to the parent that it would only be for his favorite language (the "uber clojure IDE" he dreamt?)?

It was due to huge community demand that LT promised to support Javascript and Python too.

>Once it's dead the space it frees up can be filled again by something that actually works.

Nobody stopped the parent or anyone else from using something existing "that actually works" or creating something even better.

In fact the project is already usable for a lot of us for daily exploratory coding, not to mention having put some nice ideas to the forefront of future IDE work, including having concretely inspired the Swift playground features (as the Swift designer admitted).

It's just the usual old HN piss contest.

As if it was all a scheme to make $300K off of kickstarter. I don't know where the parent lives, but for someone like Chris and with Chris' past, that's money you can make in half a year in the US software business -- not having to slave to create a whole new IDE, or hire other people to give them a chunk of the money off...

[ticking]

> It never said it was the "the uber clojure IDE", not even used any words to this effect.

In the beginning it was clearly marketed as a clojure ide, and if you look at the comments on HN at the time it's clear that it was perceived as such.

http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/04/12/light-table---a-new-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3836978

>"Catering too much to other languages"? What does that even mean? Did anybody signed to the parent that it would only be for his favorite language (the "uber clojure IDE" he dreamt?)? It was due to huge community demand that LT promised to support Javascript and Python too.

This is what broke it's back though. By trying to go with all languages at once they failed to focus on getting one right first. They should have added new ones later on.

>Nobody stopped the parent or anyone else from using something existing "that actually works" or creating something even better.

I've heard it many times over the years in the clojure world, "I'd start on an editor, but it looks like LT is going to be exactly what I want so I'll just wait." Only after its failure was apparent things like Gorilla-Repl popped up.

> including having concretely inspired the Swift playground features (as the Swift designer admitted).

I'd like a source for that. LT is directly inspired by the work of Bred Victor who _worked for apple_ and Swift has at least one of the Factor devs, which is a highly dynamic language with a live coding environment.

> As if it was all a scheme to make $300K off of kickstarter. He made a lot more than that on Kickstarter, and has some Venture capital as well iirc.

Chris has a history of half finished unmaintained projects, so especially with his past I'd be suspicious.

Eve is the same, it promises to make programming mainstream but storing your UI in a Datalog DB is a huge mess. DL is great, but the stuff he does with it is just horrid.

[smrtinsert]

well stated.

[tormeh]

Combining old features is a new feature.