Comment by cs702
13 years ago
Light Table looks brilliant and clearly deserves much success... but I can't help but wonder if it will ever catch on as much as I'd hope, because the alternative -- using plain-text files -- is (IMO) a canonical example of the simple-to-implement, New-Jersey-style, worse-is-better approach.
As comments elsewhere in this thread (e.g., see stcredzero's and gfodor's comments) detail, the ideas behind Light Table have been around for decades, yet somehow failed to catch on in prior incarnations. Why?
Some here say it's because earlier proponents of these ideas were just too early, meaning that hardware and infrastructure weren't sufficiently powerful at the time. Others here say that early proponents and their implementations were too ideological and not pragmatic enough. Maybe.
My gut tells me earlier incarnations lost out in the marketplace because MIT/Stanford-style approaches tend to lose out to simple-to-implement, New Jersey-style, 'worse-is-better' approaches in the long run. What prevents Light Table from suffering a similar fate?
I hope I'm wrong.
Light Table has problems for non-trivial code anyway. What happens when functions have side effects like deleting files? Most of my code involves networking, especially Android devices talking to http servers providing functionality that has state. Things don't run in isolation, there are databases involved and code can't be called willy nilly.
And a lot of code is about error handling. In addition to the normal path I really need to see the flow through the problems - permissions issues, timeouts, resource limits, service failures etc.