Light Table VS gtoolkit

https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable

Looks like the project has been archived

I think LightTable development stalled out when the original creator left the project in 2015. Likely the project was too ambitious and maybe ahead of its time. Or maybe Clojure was not the right language to build an IDE...

I think the closest we got to a closure of Light Table is this: https://chris-granger.com/2014/10/01/beyond-light-table/

Which includes:

> Light Table will continue to go on strong. We haven’t talked too much about it lately, but it’s used by tens of thousands of people and still growing. We use it every day to help us build Eve and thanks to the awesome people in the community that has sprung up around it, it gets better every week.

Judging by GitHub contribution data (https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/graphs/contributors...), it seems there has only been 25 commits (from one author) since Sep 20, 2019.

Light Table - A customizable editor with instant feedback and showing data values flow through your code.

Most IDEs nowadays are as extensible as Emacs is, but most people don't think of them as app platforms, they think of them as IDEs, so they don't bother craeting Email or IRC clients for their IDEs: - Racket's own DrRacket IDE is pretty extensible, although no one seems to try to extend it with apps like Magit, Org-Mode, Calc, or whatever other useful features that Emacs provides. It is theoretically possible, but it just hasn't happened yet. - LightTable is a powerful programming editor written and extensible in Clojure. - Gnome's Gedit can be scripted in Python.

I think it would be better to create an Emacs Lisp interpreter in Clojure for the LightTable editor.

It looks like it's not completely abandoned, at least. https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/discussions/2506

I'm no Bozhidar, but thought I'd share some links you might find interesting:

- https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable - Clojure editor made in Clojure, not sure if it's being maintained anymore, core authors moved on to a different project if I remember correctly.

- https://github.com/mogenslund/liquid - Clojure editor made in Clojure, fairly new and basic but has a pretty tight integration with Clojure (itself really) which makes it interesting and it can also be embedded into other applications (or embed your other applications into Liquid)

- https://github.com/Olical/conjure - My daily driver for Clojure development. Is not an editor by itself, but it's written in Clojure, and exposed to neovim as a vim plugin. Not only supports Clojure, but also Fennel, Janet and Racket so far. Pretty handy if you sometimes like to dive into Clojure-like languages that are not Clojure (or Racket).

Your ideas sounded very much like a mixup of Common Lisp with SLIME, Smalltalk interactivity and Unison-like storage of code in a database instead of files.

I've tried all of them, I think the closest thing I've seen to what you describe, which I also find very attractive, is the GT Smalltalk environment: https://gtoolkit.com/

Have you tried that? They call this idea "moldable development" as you can "mold" your environment to your needs.

Even though I loved it, I ended up not using it much, mostly because it's a bit too heavy to keep handy for exploration all the time when needed (it takes like 1GB of RAM even when idle!)... as I already can do most of that with emacs, which is much lighter, I just stick with it.

> This power that Smalltalk systems have where the code runs in a GUI that is also the editor/debugger/etc has deeply fascinated me recently.

Have you tried emacs?

> And I'd like to actually understand a tool that I'd have to dive into that deeply, and I think I'll never have the time to truly understand all of the VM, the classes, etc.

I've recently tried to do that myself with Smalltalk via the Glamorous Toolkit[1] (a beautiful, modern Smalltalk environment based on Pharo). Because the programming environment itself comes with a Book teaching it, you can basically just read it as a normal digital book, but with the superpower that everything is editable and interactive: you can change the book itself, every code example is runnable and you can inspect the result objects right there, change it, modify the view for it... they say it's "moldable development" because you almost literally mold the environment as you write your code and learn about the platform.

> And I'd like to be able to create applications that run without shipping the entire Smalltalk VM.

That's why even though I really enjoyed SmallTalk, I can't really see it as anything more than a curiosity. I tried using it at least for my own occasional data exploration because it has good visualisation capabilities and super easy to use HTTP client/JSON parser etc., but the system is so heavy (1GB+ of RAM) that I couldn't justify keeping it open all the time like I do with emacs, on the offchance that I might need to use it for some small task.

Anyway, perhaps that's something you might be interested in.

[1] https://gtoolkit.com/

I have been building a drawing and animation system in Pharo (smalltalk) for a few months, using a really neat new UI called glamorous toolkit.

Last time I tried to "hydrate" thousands of SQL rows into objects and both Pharo and the Glamorous Toolkit froze up. Maybe that is to be expected, but I've done that a million times on the JVM without any problems.

In my opinion the idea is more than direct data manipulation. It is about how we get feedback. In drawing, the medium to draw is the same medium to read. In programming, there is often a mismatch - coding on a text file, running on somewhere else, e.g. terminal, browser, remote server. If you count surrounding activities for programming, like versioning, debugging, metering and profiling, even more system is involved. We are not even touching the myriad of SaaS offering each tackling carve out a little pie out of the programming life cycle.

Back to your question, from my naive understanding, smalltalk seems to be an all in one environment. The Glamorous Toolkit [1] seems to be that environment on steroid. I have no useful experience to share though.

https://gtoolkit.com/

Wrote a review on it on the website, copypasting:

Glamorous Toolkit[1] promotes the idea of moldable development[2].

There's a talk on it: Tudor Gîrba - Moldable development.[3]

The basic idea is to have multiple views and editors for any piece of data in your system (including code). Kind of interesting, but the toolkit looks and acts more like a fancy computational notebook type of environment, but without explicitly being a computational notebook.

The site on moldable development states its difference with literate programming:

They are similar in that they both promote the use of narratives for depicting systems. However, Literate Programming offers exactly a single narrative, and that narrative is tied to the definition of the code. Through Moldable Development we recognize that we always need multiple narratives, and that those narratives must be able to address any part of the system (not only static code).

And that's a sensible viewpoint. But I still see it as an advanced version of a literate programming, all done within an interactive environment.

The focus of Glamorous Toolkit seems to be on explaining a code base or a certain part of the system via presenting it via a custom tool.

But I am not too convinced with the top-level development model / workflow it assumes for you. I guess it's too narrowly-focused / opinionated.

It's also a custom fork of Pharo, so the question of long-term stability is even more unclear than that of Pharo itself.

I can't say I can compare it to Project Mage in any meaningful way, except it's also a live environment.

[1] https://gtoolkit.com/

Wow, that's very interesting, never heard of it before. In the first link and they've mentioned smalltalk and I remember checking out https://gtoolkit.com which I think has some of the ideas from emacs but is implemented in smalltalk. I always wondered if gtoolkit could fundamentally offer something emacs couldn't (at the principal level) but now that you've lebaled them together, I think I know the answer is no

prolly a bit outside the mainstream but -> https://gtoolkit.com/