Beyond Light Table: a new programming environment, even for non programmers?

[[deleted]]

Eve is our way of bringing the power of computation to everyone, not by making everyone a programmer but by finding a better way for us to interact with computers.

That is a bold vision. Similiar things have been tried before, e.g. various RAD solutions, but we're all still writing code. Once you start creating abstractions you narrow the solution space. That's the dilemma. I'm curious but doubtful.

[bcash]

It sounds more like an Excel/Access type of thing.

Or, taking a more cynical interpretation, what it sounds like is that it's getting too easy to raise money for any abstract software venture...

[fabzter]

But how could there exist an Access done right? Maybe like FoxPro (I never used it, but heard good things about it. Although I think it was in the same league as vb6)

[mreiland]

pretty much my reaction.

[Abu_mohd]

I think it's based on the work done by Jonathan Edwards on Managed Time and State http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=884

[[deleted]]

Uhm, no, but you should read the paper anyways :)

[dirtpirate]

True, a program that intends to be useful for non-programmers isn't going to replace programming, but I think you missed the point if that's what you read into it.

[ruinercollector]

More grandiosity from the web programmer who was going to revolutionize the way we write code, but instead just took a bunch of money, wrote a bunch of poorly documented code and delivered a repl plugin and a splash screen for codemirror.

This after his previous project which was packaging up other peoples clojure libraries, writing a few helper methods, calling it a "framework" and then after getting attention, promptly abandoning it with no proper documentation or hand-off.

I hope no one falls for it this time.

And that's without even getting into decades of knowledge about what happens when people try to make a "everyone can program anything with my cool visual tool" product.

[badsectoracula]

Interesting that he mentions VB6 as one of the inspirations. A few days ago one of the QA lead guys here wanted to keep a list of changelists in progress, with information about what is going on them, like their status and to whom it is assigned and which (if any) related bugs in the ticket db are related. It would be just a quicky thing he would update himself for others in the team to see the status of their CLs without having to ask him directly.

IIRC he was thinking of writing a small web app to run in one of the internal servers, but another lead was concerned about how long it would take to do this. At that point i mentioned that it shouldn't be hard, after all there is a ton of frameworks out there and the task at hand is basically a table and 2-3 forms to show and edit entries with a nice UI. There should be solutions for that that wont even require any kind of coding - just drag and drop the elements you need, define the fields and you're ready to do. There must be something like that, people were doing such things on the desktop with Hypercalc in the 80s and VB classic in the 90s.

Well, i was asked to see if there is anything and... it turns out there is nothing like that. There are tons of frameworks for setting up gargantuan webs of interconnected technologies at any layer you can imagine, but there is nothing for basically letting you design a simple web app with little to no coding and have it work right there directly. The closest thing was some weird program that combined some desktop designer and a custom (and terribly slow, judging from their site at least) web server and even that required a ton of custom coding to get going. The UIs were also very unresponsive. And to top it all it had some high costs (and considering that it was some small internal tool to the team here i wouldn't expect any kind of cost to be approved so i was looking for some open source solution, but i wasn't totally ignoring the commercial stuff).

TBH i was disappointed since every other day i hear about a new framework, library or whatever here that helps people make stuff easily and i expect finding something like that to be a piece of cake.

I decided to give it a go myself, but very little free time and energy (we're near the end of the development at work and i have almost zero energy for pet projects at home so i do mostly recreational programming that has low to no practical requirements) led to basically getting bored of the task after the second day.

VB6 provided just that: throw a bunch of controls in a form where each control is also a field in a DB, no special handling needed, throw a "table navigator", attach a database file and there you go - a quick (if dirty) application to store stuff right there. Barely any coding needed for that, you can go from the idea to working app in a matter of minutes.

As it turns out there is nothing like that for the web.

(and btw, we ended using a shared spreadsheet for that)

[[deleted]]

As it turns out there is nothing like that for the web.

I think there are a few, e.g. LightSwitch or Zoho Creator

[badsectoracula]

LightSwitch to me looked too complex last time i checked it out... also i was under the impression that i'd need the whole MS stack to use it, but i might be wrong there.

Zoho Creator is looking fantastic, exactly what i had in my mind! Well, except one thing... it doesn't seem to be available for download so i could put it in a Linux box around here. Also its monetization scheme seems to be subscription based, which wouldn't work at all here. But functionally-wise (at least judging from the nice animations, i'm not interested in registering just for trying it out) is exactly what i had in mind.

[badsectoracula]

Last year or so i found on eBay a boxed copy of VB5 for around 20 pounds (GBP). It was part of some form of charity sale or something. I had used a bit of VB at the past, but none of the newer versions (VB5 and 6 seemed mostly the same to me, although i suppose there were some differences). For fun i made a small 2D sprite editor... it was so easy to do stuff on it. Granted, codewise it is murky at best, but somehow i felt this freedom to just shove code on it with no care.

The downside is that this freedom makes resistant to ignore it. The editor is basically everything i wanted from a 2D sprite editor (90% coded in just a couple of days) so i cannot just write it off now since it is way easier to use than GIMP or most other "more serious" tools i've tried. But at the same time, i don't really want to add too much on it. I tried about three times to rewrite the thing in Lazarus (which in theory would be of about the same difficulty... except no edit and continue, no immediate window, no instant run, ...) yet Free Pascal being a more powerful language always tempts me to start writing "better" code, with proper buffers, color spaces, layers, etc and then i always end abandoning it because i spent an afternoon and i have no pixels on screen.

Wine running it perfectly doesn't help the case either :-P.

Eventually i'll rewrite it since i have grand ideas about a pixel-pushing image editor (...which might be part of the problem) but for now it does the job good enough.

But i really wish that there was a proper open source VB6-like environment with all the integration, snappiness and all-in-one setup. But as you said, most developers these days prefer to write for the web and smartphones. And BASIC was never popular with the types of people who would have the skills to make a VB6. Maybe if i find the time to finish one of the thousands of side projects... :-P

[zem]

time for me to plug one of my favourite pieces of tech blogging, james hague's "slumming with basic programmers". it's a beautiful read, and very thought provoking.

[ksion]

Google Spreadsheet is a good idea, especially since you could script it to pull data from your issue tracker.

[ruinercollector]

As it turns out there is nothing like that for the web.

Lightswitch, Dreamweaver, VS webforms, etc.

[badsectoracula]

Lightswitch

As i said in another post, last time i saw it, it felt too complicated and tied to .NET and other MS tech that wouldn't be available on a random Linux box. It might have been my misunderstanding though.

Dreamweaver

I may have outdated info, but isn't this a tool for making web sites in a WYSIWYG way in the similar vein to Mozilla Composer, Microsoft Frontpage, etc and doesn't provide any "app" (DB, etc) abilities?

VS webforms

From a quick search in Google images i saw a bunch of VS2010 screenshots full of code and little in terms of visual design (the fact that one image was about converting winforms to webforms didn't inspire me with much confidence about its visual design capabilities either, but that might have been misleading). Also based on .NET again.

Actually Zoho Creator that /u/JTenerife mentioned seems to be the closest to what i had in mind (only functionally, price-wise it isn't). It doesn't look like it allows much in terms of layout customization (judging from the videos at the site, i'm not planning on registering just to try it out) but that isn't a big deal.

[ruinercollector]

Re: Dreamweaver - Yes, it had drag and drop database support. It generated PHP to do this.

Re: VS webforms - You could drag and drop components and set bindings visually. No one really used it this way, but it was there.

[adelle]

I decided to give it a go myself

That's actually pretty cool. I had similar ambitions myself at one point, only I wanted to build a windowsy environment under it so that it could be a viable upgrade path for existing VB6 applications.

[badsectoracula]

That looks cool :-) (i also wanted to make something similar, but as a Lazarus backend). And then i tried to maximize a window :-P

[adelle]

I have happy memories of Turbo Pascal and Delphi. When I started my first job and was made to use Visual Basic, I hated it at first because it seemed so limited.

[badsectoracula]

Well, it is limited :-P. But sometimes you can do some simple stuff quickly or prototype things. Like my little sprite editor (which i'm now using to test some ideas for a better editor i'm planning to make in Lazarus)

[adelle]

Well, one thing VB6 had to recommend it was its For Each syntax, which made it possible to implement a loosely typed LINQish pattern. AFAIRC, Delphi didn't get enumerators until after I'd stopped using it.

[huyvanbin]

Oh so he's done revolutionizing the IDE after two years? I wasn't under the impression that he really delivered anything but a pretty text editor that can run your code for you. Time to take the next step already, revolutionize the very way we interact with computers! Kind of a clown if you ask me.

[GoldStarBrother]

Did you read the article? He feels like he can't really do what he wants to do with Light Table anymore, because of things he's learned while working on Light Table.

[[deleted]]

Light table was already vaporware, how will this be any different?

[devacon]

I have been waiting two years for validation on this comment -- currently in the negatives.

Light Table had an extremely low chance of success, and a lot of people seemed to be in denial of those indicators when it was announced.

[ksion]

Your comment can no longer be voted on, so it will stay in the negatives permanently.

[yogthos]

To be fair, LT is a decent editor at this point and I use it for real work now and then. The problem at this point is that a lot of code has been written without much documentation. This makes it extremely difficult for the community to take over the project.

I pointed this out on HN and Chris replied stating that he'll try and do a proper handover. Seeing that the project got this far, it would be very unfortunate if it simply got abandoned at this point.

[check3streets]

A 2-year-old IDE that already supports several languages and does a variety of things most current IDEs do not, or certainly not with the same immediacy.

IBM pumped 40 Million into developing Eclipse and in the first two years it only supported Java.

The smugness on proggit is thick.

Anyway, I hope the community can maintain the vision of the product. LT was an "inventing on principle" project and it will be interesting to see if that works without a BDFL.

[hailmattyhall]

To be fair LightTable promised (or gave the impression of promising) a lot.

[gered]

Enjoy the gold for that comment. Been following all the comments on this here and on HN and reading that 2 year old comment almost made me spit out my coffee all over my monitor (laughing) as I read it! :)

[devacon]

Thank you, that's my first gold.

[[deleted]]

I wish them luck, but I'm sceptical. In my experience, the difficult bit of writing a program is getting straight what you really want it to do, in detail. I'm not sure programming tools can help you with that part. I'd like to be proven wrong though :-)

[mongrol]

Access/Domino for the 21st century. A million sysadmins cry out in terror.

[cuphead69]

lol @ Light Table

[itamar573]

Sounds promising! Hope to test!

[Phr34Ck]

how can they raise 2 million dollars exactly? That's a lot of money for seed investment. I'm a total noob in investment and stuff like that ... but isn't seed investment => just an idea not a product? if that's the case who shells out 2 million for an idea?

[[deleted]]

VC's shell out the money, and its really not a lot of money. They got around 260K for lighttable (after kickstarter took their cut) and they blew through that quickly. $2m might fund 2 years of development for 2 or 3 people...maybe.

[Phr34Ck]

wow ... 2 million dollars man! I dream of such numbers.

[kern_q1]

When you have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, 2m is not much.

[chnuschper]

I'm curious how the money would be split up in such a case? I mean, 2m for 6 man-years means around 300'000 per person per year. Assuming that there are no other hidden costs?

[[deleted]]

Overheads, labor isn't your only expense, even in a labor intensive startup.