Light Table. Light Table - a new IDE concept. (1) You're right, I should have explained that more.
I wanted to contrast this with something like "spreadsheets today have a datum-flow model" but a nice phrasing didn't come to me and I posted without remembering to insert the missing sentence. What I mean is that spreadsheets are (right now) fundamentally based on the idea of a grid of cells which are individually meaningless and can contain anything, any individual datum, and datums may refer to each other by arbitrary operations. This grid view might be a good way to present datums to users but it requires a style convention when you want to write it to be readable; it encourages styles which obscure your ability to actually see what this sheet does.
It's not just that you can't see how the data flows, although that's part of it -- it's that the data is allowed to flow in ways that you could never easily visualize in the first place. . (3) That sounds suspicious. mean(v) should be associated with the column v in a clear way. Light Table - a new IDE concept. You can now try Light Table out via the Light Table Playground!
Light Table's kickstarter has wrapped up! Despite the dramatic shift toward simplification in software interfaces, the world of development tools continues to shrink our workspace with feature after feature in every release. Even with all of these things at our disposal, we're stuck in a world of files and forced organization - why are we still looking all over the place for the things we need when we're coding? Why is everything just static text? Bret Victor hinted at the idea that we can do much better than we are now - we can provide instant feedback, we can show you how your changes affect a system.
We can do better, and to that end, let me introduce you to Light Table is based on a very simple idea: we need a real work surface to code on, not just an editor and a project explorer. Light table is based on a few guiding principles: Let's take a look at how these things manifest themselves in Light Table. Docs everywhere. Light Table's numbers. 15 Apr 2012 EDIT: Light Table is now on kickstarter!
EDIT: oh, and I set up a mailing list to keep informed. All I can say is "wow"! The response to Light Table has been far more positive and far greater than I could've imagined. To put it into perspective, here are some aggregated numbers at the time of this writing: There were 105,872 unique visits to the post, just shy of 200,000 pageviews and 80,000 video plays.It has been viewed in 163 countries (there are only 204 total)The post on HN stayed on the front page for more than 48 hours (It's actually still there now) and has amassed more than 1400 points.
So the big question on most people's minds is "Now what? ". I was surprised at the number of people who cried out for a Kickstarter for the project. What languages will it support? The first two languages it will support are Javascript and Clojure, but the application will be written in such a way that adding new languages can happen through plugins.
Can I script/extend it?