The term “web3” seems pretty fluid and is being used as a label for a bunch of disparate ideas. Given that it’s a decentralized group describing a decentralized movement, that lack of focus isn’t exactly surprising. Almost by definition it’s going to end up being different things to different people. Most of the descriptions I’ve seen focus on mechanisms - block chains, smart contracts, tokens,…
Never heard of Eve? Read more here . In the pursuit of our goal to make programming more accessible, we’ve built over 30 versions of Eve since we started about two years ago. These experiments explored some really interesting directions and by testing them with people, we learned a lot about problem solving and the motivations for computation in general. Many of our experiments boil down to…
Never heard of Eve? Read more here . Today marks a huge milestone for us - the first public release of Eve . After a ton of research , dozens of prototypes, and a slew of tests we’ve finally come to something that we think is the beginning of Eve. It’s still in its infancy with lots missing and assuredly more than a few bugs, but it’s reached a point where we can start to demonstrate the vision we…
Despite the good intentions behind the movement to get people to code, both the basic premise and approach are flawed. The movement sits on the idea that “coding is the new literacy,” but that takes a narrow view of what literacy really is. If you ask google to define literacy it gives a mechanical definition: the ability to read and write. This is certainly accurate, but defining literacy as…
I have three big announcements to make today. The first is the official announcement of our next project. We’ve been quietly talking about it over the past few months, but today we want to tell you a bit more about it and finally reveal its name: Eve is our way of bringing the power of computation to everyone, not by making everyone a programmer but by finding a better way for us to interact with…
this post is based on my talk, "Finding a way out" , from Strange Loop 2013 When I built the original prototype of Light Table I didn’t have any grand purpose or goal in mind. I simply had some ideas on how programming could be better and I wanted to see how hard they would be to build. Until fairly recently, it never dawned on me that I’ve actually spent the past decade trying out ideas on how…
Today Light Table is taking a huge step forward - every bit of its code is now on Github and along side of that, we’re releasing Light Table 0.6.0 , which includes all the infrastructure to write and use plugins. If you haven’t been following the 0.5.* releases, this latest update also brings a tremendous amount of stability, performance, and clean up to the party. All of this together means that…
I’m happy to finally announce that we have a new addition to the Light Table team: Jamie Brandon will be joining us, coming all the way from sunny old England. Jamie brings some much needed British civility (what else could you possibly learn at Cambridge and Oxford?) to our otherwise lawless duo of merry men. He also happens to be incredibly passionate about getting people the tools they need to…
After much ado, I’m happy to announce that Light Table 0.5.0 is out today: Go give it a try ! Faster, better, stronger This release was about simplifying the experience of Light Table, making it far more robust, and making sure it’s fast enough to handle whatever you throw at it. We’ve made big strides in each of these areas, from removing some of the UI elements that didn’t add anything (the left…
About a year and a half ago, my mother’s partner was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given less than six months to live. Since then it has been treatments, pain, and truly miraculous victories - but the word “terminal” is pretty clear; at some point you will lose. I flew home as soon as things started to take a turn for the worse and since then I have had to do things I could never have…
Today, I’m proud to announce the 0.4 release of Light Table - go download it! A bit of the future. With this release our goal was to bring more people into the fold, to increase the number of languages we can eval, and to smooth out some of the core experience. After 0.3, we finally had a chance to move the ball forward some - from live modifying websites directly inside of LT to injecting code…
A year ago today I put up the original blog post for Light Table . It was just a simple video of a prototype I made in less than a week while I was visiting my grandparents without internet - at the time we had no idea what it would become. To be honest, I thought some would think it was neat, but then it would fade away like most “neat” things on the internet. It’s been a wild ride this past…
With our release of the 0.2.0 version of Light Table we laid the foundation we needed to continue moving forward. In this release we wanted to focus on making that foundation a joy to use by taking the time to really craft an experience. To that end, even though 0.3.0 is still an alpha, it will feel much better to anyone who used the previous version and many of the things that seemed manual in…
Here’s a video of this talk from the Clojure Conj 2012 In my last post I talked about building a game in ClojureScript using a Component-Entity-System engine and I hinted that the ideas that underly that architecture inspired how we designed Light Table . The reason why stems from the architectural goals of the project: Runtime modifiability High contextuality Infinitely customizable Games have a…
For the Node Knockout last month, we wanted to build a game in Light Table using ClojureScript. What we ultimately came up with was a fun little racing platformer called ChromaShift . All the code and assets were created during the 48 hours of the competition and in the end we did pretty well , coming in 7th overall . Here’s a video of the game in action: How do you build a game in ClojureScript?…
Hey folks! As promised, we’ll be live streaming from my laptop while we do the Node Knockout using Light Table this weekend. We’ll be building a multiplayer platformer game in ClojureScript. Stream will start right at 4:00pm PST here on Ustream .
We have to start with a picture. Or hey, just go download it and see for yourself. This is the new Light Table - rewritten from the ground up after having learned a ton about what it’s going to take to make a truly extensible and connected environment. There are a lot of interesting ideas under the hood that make up the core of this new implementation, but the important part is that it is a solid…
My last post generated some discussion on telling people more about the ideas that came before Light Table . In many ways we’ve been rediscovering the past and since that initial blog post months ago, we’ve learned a ton about the ideas that we’re trying to bring to the industry. In the talks I’ve done recently, I’ve mentioned a bit about all the innovations that happened over the past 40 or so…
Yesterday I gave a talk at Strange Loop about Light Table, in which I stressed the idea that we are not the “recipe writers” we used to describe ourselves as - that instead we are “abstractioners”. We aren’t writing down the steps that the computer needs to follow to make something happen, but instead we’re consuming and subsequently creating new abstractions. If you look at the past 10 years we…
The Light Table Playground is getting a huge update today that we’re really excited to show you. New to Light Table? It’s a new kind of reactive IDE, check out the original post to learn more. A new launcher While the shell scripts got us this far, it’s time to bid them farewell and move to a much more robust and useable jar-based launcher. The experience of getting the Playground is now to just…
I’m happy to announce the release of v0.0.7 of the Light Table Playground . This version is a serious upgrade to the Instarepl that brings the ability to manually evaluate things and work in your own projects. Here’s a breakdown of what’s new. A little guide The first thing you’re greeted with when you open 0.0.7 is what we’re calling the shade. The shade shows you new things that you can do and…
Yesterday we released the playground to the world. It has been a ridiculous past 24 hours, so ridiculous in fact that I felt I had to share some of the numbers. Within the first 5 hours over 500,000 lines of code had been eval’d by folks using the Light Table Playground. By this morning, exactly 24 hours after the launch, it looked like this: More than 1.1 million lines of code have been executed!…
I’m happy to announce the official release of the Light Table Playground ! You can find instructions for getting it here: http://app.kodowa.com/playground What is the playground? The playground is a chance for you to follow along as we test out new things for Light Table . In return, it helps us collect metrics on how people are using our experiments as well as gives us an opportunity to see how…
I love doing presentations and I’m happy to say that we have a few for Light Table lined up throughout the year: 6/7/2012 - Bay Area Clojure Meetup 7/19/2012 - OSCON 9/23/2012 - Strange Loop 11/7/2012 - Oredev The Clojure meetup will be a really informal demo of Light Table with most of the time spent on Q&A, while the others are more normal talks. I’ll let you know if any more crop up!
Just a few moments ago our Kickstarter campaign closed with a truly amazing 7,317 backers at $316,720. It’s been such a whirlwind story over the past 45 days from a simple blog post to what is now a funded startup, a successful kickstarter campaign, and a seat at the YC table . None of that would have been possible without the faith and dedication of all of you. For your support, I give you my…
You can now try Light Table out via the Light Table Playground ! I’m going to make a bold claim: The future of tools isn’t in a better Eclipse or Visual Studio, it’s in easily created domain specific experiences. If we look at the trends in programminging languages over the past decade, we’ve seen a resurgence of metaprogramming and DSLs. We as an industry are starting to rediscover the power of…
I’m happy to announce that as of yesterday Light Table has joined a host of amazing startups for the Summer 2012 batch of YCombinator . Under the guidance of YC we believe we have the best possible chance to not just make Light Table a reality, but to help craft a new future for the way we create software. This does, however, mean that circumstances have changed. We rallied together as a community…
After an amazing showing by the development community, Light Table has hit its goal of $200,000 with 20 days left to go! I want to extend my sincerest thanks to all of you who have helped spread the word, and committed to a future of a better tools. It has been an amazing past couple of weeks that has given me a chance to talk to some of the best and brightest in the business. I think as a group…
It’s been really interesting seeing how people have responded to the idea of Light Table over the past week and understandably there have been a lot of questions as the ideas have sunk in (for me too). Many of these are questions about the details of exactly how this or that feature will work and that brings me to something I want to address: what I showed is not a final product, but instead an…
EDIT: Light Table is now on kickstarter! EDIT: oh, and I set up a mailing list to keep informed. All I can say is “wow”! The response to Light Table has been far more positive and far greater than I could’ve imagined. To put it into perspective, here are some aggregated numbers at the time of this writing: There were 105,872 unique visits to the post, just shy of 200,000 pageviews and 80,000 video…
You can now try Light Table out via the Light Table Playground ! Light Table’s kickstarter has wrapped up! Despite the dramatic shift toward simplification in software interfaces, the world of development tools continues to shrink our workspace with feature after feature in every release. Even with all of these things at our disposal, we’re stuck in a world of files and forced organization - why…
edit: there is now a downloadable jar: https://github.com/ibdknox/live-cljs/downloads After seeing Bret Victor’s talk, Inventing on Principle , the other night, I was curious how hard it would be to build some of things he demoed - so I put together a live ClojureScript game editor today. Here’s a video of it in action: It basically replicates what was in his demo (minus the Braid graphics). The…
Lots of folks have been interested in ClojureScript lately, but have had a hard time figuring out what a CLJS app actually looks like. So today I recorded myself building an Overtone controller (that I use on an iPad) using noir , fetch , jayq , and crate . In the end, it looks like this: Since I don’t narrate in the video, I figured I’d give a breakdown of some of the main ideas below. If you…
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