| 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... |
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.