QED VS Light Table

Not exactly "experimental", considering the Unix heritage, but -- line editors.

"I've seen [visual] editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them. I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing." -- Ken Thompson, on the superiority of ed to visual editors. Summarized by Peter Salus in A Quarter Century of UNIX (Addison-Wesley, 1994).

Definitely a blast from the past, but I do think line editors may force one to write simpler programs -- or to think in smaller chunks, as opposed to (doom)scrolling or moving about incrementally on a large screen.

Rob Pike's sam editor has an interesting command language. You're not limited to thinking in "lines" as in ed or sed; rather, the whole file is a giant string that you manipulate using regular expressions, external pipes, etc: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/sam_lang_tutorial/sam_tut.pdf

Its predecessor, qed, is also interesting, extremely powerful, but it seems to have a much steeper learning curve. I have used sam quite a bit, but not qed. https://github.com/phonologus/QED/raw/master/doc/qed-tutoria...

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Looks like the project has been archived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).