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Comment by robertkrahn01

5 years ago

I've worked for ten years on the Lively Kernel project [1,2,3], originally created by Dan Ingalls at Sun Microsystems. Running JavaScript, Smalltalk, R, Clojure, Haskell, Python, C++ and a few other languages in it. When I first saw replit, I thought, wow someone copied 1/4 of Lively. Do they really think they had an original idea?

[1] https://lively-kernel.org

[2] https://lively-next.org

[3] https://cloxp.github.io/cloxp-intro.html

15 comments

robertkrahn01

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tzs  5 years ago

Did any of the Replit people work on Lively Kernel? I think what has the Replit guy upset is not that some random person did something similar, but rather that someone who worked at Replit did something similar.

As far as Lively Kernel goes, is there a list of languages it supports? All I got from your links is that it is a JavaScript-based web development environment, seems to have a lot of Smalltalk related stuff, and that it includes something called lively.ide, which provides "Tool support for programming and debugging JavaScript, HTML, CSS, shell" and "Other languages can be plucked in as needed (see cloxp and LivelyR)."

  • Dah00n  5 years ago

    No but the CEO worked at Code Academy so he actually kinda did what he is accusing the intern of doing.

  • robertkrahn01  5 years ago

    > Did any of the Replit people work on Lively Kernel?

    No, and I wasn't suggesting that. Though Lively was a project at YC Research in 2016/2017 and replit is a YC 18 company I think. So they might have heard about it but I do not remember giving any demos to folks involved with it.

    And even if, we actually invited folks to copy the ideas. The Lively project was not a product but trying to carry forward a set of ideas rooted in Smalltalk. Every copy (even if its not a good one) is cool to see. It has the change to make the language and tooling eco system better, programming easier and more immediate, and might invite more people to get started building software and having fun with computers.

    > is there a list of languages it supports

    No not really. We build out a few to have more polish (as you mentioned LivelyR and cloxp, support for shell programming and node.js that is part of Lively itself). But there isn't really much to it: here is e.g. a quick'n dirty Haskell "subserver" that can run as part of Lively and allows to load a Haskell runtime, load Haskell files and evaluate expressions [1] (this is anno 2013, please don't judge too hard about the code ;). Some of these are floating around. We then customized the ACE editor [2] a bit for providing some fundamental editing experience (it has syntax highlighting for a large number of languages builtin). That's it, for a simple integration, not much is needed really.

    There is also the amazing Ohm project [3], a toolkit for writing PEG parser and interpreters which is standalone but got its integration into Lively as well. It allows to quickly experiment with new language ideas or implement grammars/interpreters for existing languages.

    [1] https://lively-web.org/core/servers/HaskellServer.js

    [2] https://ace.c9.io/

    [3] https://github.com/harc/ohm

    • scroot  5 years ago

      Hey Robert, it would be great to get in touch. I'm part of a group that has built an authorship system inspired by HyperCard/Smalltalk [1] and we are using OhmJS to implement our language and interpreter.

      We are inching closer towards a more "public" release, and hope to be there in the next few weeks

      [1] https://github.com/dkrasner/Simpletalk

      1 reply →

    • piemadd  5 years ago

      > Though Lively was a project at YC Research in 2016/2017 and replit is a YC 18 company I think.

      You're right about Replit going to YC after Lively, but Replit actually started much earlier (2009ish)

      2 replies →

seg_lol  5 years ago

There still exists a fork of the Riju project on github which I have cloned locally.

I would be more interested in running all of these languages in wasm and the execution state can be live migrated between the server and the client, that would be something that could surpass other online repls.

https://qvault.io/python/running-python-in-the-browser-with-...

Repl.it has no standing to code written by Radon.

hcs  5 years ago

Lively Kernel all runs in the client, though, while repl.it runs the code server-side. Not that this was new, either, but it seems confusing to compare to Lively. (It's been years since I've checked out either of these projects so sorry if I'm misremembering or missing new developments.)