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Programming Python The Almighty Buck

Light Table IDE Finds Funding Success 94

Posted by timothy from the ok-but-dark-table-next dept.
omar.sahal writes "Chris Granger's Light Table IDE, covered here previously on Slashdot, has been successfully funded by a Kickstarter campaign. 7,317 backers brought in $316,720, obliging Chris to support the Python Programming language with his first release. Chris and his team have also been successful in being funded by Y Combinator. Here's some more background (video) on the concepts developed by Bret Victor found in Light Table.
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Light Table IDE Finds Funding Success More

Light Table IDE Finds Funding Success

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  • A little late (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mitreya ( 579078 ) <mitreya.gmail@com> on Saturday June 02, 2012 @01:37PM (#40195395)
    Links to Kickstarter projects are much more interesting BEFORE the the funding round ends. It's too late for anyone to participate.
    By the way, why can't I fund a closed (but funded) Kickstarter project past the deadline?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by QuasiSteve ( 2042606 )

      Links to Kickstarter projects are much more interesting BEFORE the the funding round ends.

      uhm.

      Chris Granger's Light Table IDE, covered here previously on Slashdot

      By the way, why can't I fund a closed (but funded) Kickstarter project past the deadline?

      Sometimes you can - just not on KickStarter. KickStarter is an all-or-nothing + deadline type crowdfunding platform. There's actually very few that allow projects without a deadline - invested.in is biggest one that does that, off the top of my head.
      However

      • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

        by gstrickler ( 920733 )

        ummmm, If you bother to look at the previous slashdot article, when it was covered before, it wasn't a kickstarter project.

        By the way, why can't I fund a closed (but funded) Kickstarter project past the deadline?

        Sometimes you can - just not on KickStarter.

        So, your response is that you can, except that you can't?

        It's useful to actually read the post your responding and to check your facts before posting.

        • ummmm, If you bother to look at the previous slashdot article, when it was covered before, it wasn't a kickstarter project.

          I guess if people don't bother reading past the summary at Slashdot, you would be absolutely right.
          Of course if they had, they would have found the same tidbit that the following comment quoted 10 minutes after the story was posted:
          http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2789489&cid=39699579 [slashdot.org]
          ( It was approved on the 17th )

          It's useful to actually read the post you're responding

          • Thanks for the clarifications.

            I guess if people don't bother reading past the summary at Slashdot, you would be absolutely right.
            Of course if they had, they would have found the same tidbit that the following comment quoted 10 minutes after the story was posted:
            http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2789489&cid=39699579 [slashdot.org]
            ( It was approved on the 17th )

            I looked before I commented, but I missed it. Seems Firefox was doing a case-sensitive search so searching for "kick" found no matches. Oops.

            • Is Light Table going to be an open source project or a close source project?

              • Will it be open source?

                I'm a firm believer in open source software and open source technologies. I can guarantee you that Light Table will be built on top of the technologies that are freely available to us today. As such, I believe it only fair that the core of Light Table be open sourced once it is launched. At some level, this is an experiment in how open source and business can mix - it will be educational for us all.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Raenex ( 947668 )

                  The answer, then, is no, it won't be open source. There's nothing "educational" about keeping the premium parts closed source, as it's been done by many projects. This "firm believer" nonsense is self-serving bullshit.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by UCFFool ( 832674 )

      By the way, why can't I fund a closed (but funded) Kickstarter project past the deadline?

      As a successful Kickstarter project [kickstarter.com] creator, I would hate that. It's one thing when you are doing software, but it's quite another when you are shipping a product. After it closes, you can go to the website and find out how you can get it once all Kickstarter backers are rewarded.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        By the way, why can't I fund a closed (but funded) Kickstarter project past the deadline?

        As a successful Kickstarter project [kickstarter.com] creator, I would hate that.

        I'm lost; you didn't actually explain why it would be bad for people to discover your project after it's complete.

        As a customer, if I can find out about something awesome you've done and I want to give you money for it how is that bad? As a business owner, how is it bad if people discover you through kickstarter and want to give you more money for something you've gotten off the ground?

        If it's an issue of only doing a limited run, then additional demand after the project completes indicates that your produc

        • I think what UCFFool was going for would translate into "what if you have insufficient after-the-fact interest to do another limited run at an affordable level?" This would be especially problematic with printing, where there are really deep bulk discounts.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          As a customer, if I can find out about something awesome you've done and I want to give you money for it how is that bad? As a business owner, how is it bad if people discover you through kickstarter and want to give you more money for something you've gotten off the ground?

          Supply Chain.

          If the project deadline arrives and you use the money to buy enough supplies to make a product for everyone +10% failures just to be safe. If another 100 people come along afterwards then you don't have the supplies to make and deliver the goods. If you got a bulk discount, ordering small boxes of supplies as people dribble in over a few weeks could destroy your profit margin.

          In short: Kickstarter is not a shop. You don't place orders for goods, you donate in the hope of getting something back.

        • Because you're trying to hope on a product with all the investment goodies without actually doing any of the donation/investment in a risky product. It's something no one wants to reward otherwise none of the kickerstarter projects would meet their goal because too many assholes are waiting for it to become to success first.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by DogDude ( 805747 )
      By the way, why can't I fund a closed (but funded) Kickstarter project past the deadline?

      You can. Just send the company a check.

  • Light Table - Why it's Cool (Score:5, Informative)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Saturday June 02, 2012 @02:46PM (#40195709) Journal
    It took me a long time to figure out what is interesting about Light Table. If you've seen Eclipse or Visual Studio, you might think that it's really boring, because both of those can do all that and more.

    What's cool about it is this works in Python, which is a late-bound language. So far, no IDE will give you thinks like autocomplete for a language like Python or Ruby. This isn't a huge problem, but it's nice to have.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tzot ( 834456 )

      > So far, no IDE will give you thinks like autocomplete for a language like Python
      Even "home-grown" IDLE has (semi)autocompletion.

    • Spyder [google.com] is the best that I've found. Auto-completion, documentation, style checking, and more.
    • I can't believe that to be true. Even vi will give you auto complete out of the box and there are even better auto complete vi plugins for Python out there.
      • Problem is you don't always know what type a variable is. Can't do auto-complete if you don't know what type it is.

    • How is this informative? This guy clearly doesn't know what he is talking about. PyDev (Plugin for Eclipse) gives you autocomplete since ages. You don't need static typing to be able to read out interfaces. IPython (interactive python extension) does it too. Or like pretty single one of these http://wiki.python.org/moin/IntegratedDevelopmentEnvironments [python.org] . Hell, there even a VIM autocompletion plugin, if you are into that sort of stuff.

      As for differences, how about showing results of your program as you type

      • How is this informative?

        Apparently because no one else can figure out what is cool about light table either lol.

        Showing results as you type is neither innovative, original, or often not even very useful, and neither is a method-based hierarchy. Everyone switched to thinking of them as class-based hierarchies a long time ago.

    • I can't think of a python IDE that doesn't give you autocompletion. Over glorified text editors like notepad++ aren't IDEs.
      • How can it give you autocompletion in a language that is dynamically typed? Serious question.
        • With PyCharm I assume it looks at your imports and the variables initial declaration to figure out what you meant and generally it gets it. However if it's unsure it presents you with a list of possible options. Granted if you don't have a clue what you're working with you're still going to be a bit stuck as to which one is the correct one but how many newbies load up their site-packages with a load of libs that could conflict and then take on a large project and try to rewrite it?

          It's not 100% perfect b
          • Interesting. I'm not sure what is cool about this then.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by cduffy ( 652 )

              Interesting. I'm not sure what is cool about this then.

              I can only think that you haven't looked at the demo videos - any of them.

              Giving you the results of code execution, live, as you work?

              Determining the codepaths traversed to fill out a template, and putting the specific models, controllers, views, and other related methods right in front of you -- no bouncing between files?

              Giving you tools to render your live display into an IDE pane, so you can actually play your game, show your web interface, &c. a

  • vi (Score:2)

    by 1s44c ( 552956 )

    I've never had any use for IDEs, but Light Table looks nice. Very easy access to documentation would be a massive help with just about everything.

    I'm playing with ruby on rails right now. Can anyone recommend a IDE that's actually better than using vi?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Can anyone recommend a IDE that's actually better than using vi?

      Emacs! /duck-for-cover

    • You might want to check out RubyMine [jetbrains.com]. I've never used it myself (not a Ruby person), but I'm a big fan of PyCharm, JetBrain's Python offering, which is excellent, so I imagine it would also be very good.

    • and bash.

      all you haters suck my balls.

  • What am i missing here? (Score:3)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Saturday June 02, 2012 @05:49PM (#40196663) Homepage Journal

    From a quick glance at the sparse web page, it seems rather basic and nothing to get excited about..

    So why should i care about this? ( no, not trolling, seriously. why should i want to jump ship from something like Eric or pyscripter? )

  • It would make sense for a funding system to have a limit, since there is only so much you're willing to give to investors.

    But Kickstarter is not a funding system, it's a donation system. The fact that it tries to look like funding is probably to lure the common people into giving their money away without any returns, exploiting the fact people would quite like to play at investing. It is arguably a scam.

  • It looks like the alternative to IDEs written by a hipster who thinks notepad++ is an ide. No matter how much he hates it code is written in files and no matter how much he tries to pretend they're not, it's not going to change.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lproven ( 6030 )

      So you've clearly never used code written on, say, an Apple Newton or an iPad, or possibly even a PalmOS machine - all systems where the user (for which, read "programmer") has no access to the filesystem or there IS no filesystem.

      You need to get out more. Learn about how much you don't know before you start confidently making statements about the world.

      • So which of those systems does no have a file system at all?

        Just because a system doesn't give you full access to the file system doesn't mean things aren't represent their file structure.

  • But the problem is that while showing some basic examples of "new" concepts, extending this into a fully functional IDE for "any" language and platform is going to take far more time and money to develop then what the Kickstarter project is going to provide. When was the last time you wrote code like 3 + 4 = that could provide immediate evaluation.

    That shouldn't discourage the developer from proceeding, but I think his only goal would be to be bought up by Microsoft, Apple, Google, or some other prevalent

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