Hypercard: the missing link to the web

[Bernard Devlin]

Well, things could be hotting up in the dynamic IDE world.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table?ref=history

Light Table looks like it is a modern take on the old Smalltalk IDE
(Visualage, Squeak).  It's going back to the idea of having code in an
image (stacks in our case), compared to separate files on the
filesystem (and of course, it will meet with the same issues of source
code control).

In some ways an IDE for Livecode could already be doing many of these
things that Light Table proposes.  Maybe I'm misremembering the impact
of GLX2 on our community, but with enough resources I'm sure Runrev
could have taken up the ideas in it and gone much further, given the
dynamic nature of Livecode.  We might have had our own Light Table by
now if Runrev had the funds to dedicate to that task (I'm sure some
are aghast at the idea of Light Table, and I'm far from convinced
myself).

It is quite amazing that from within the Livecode IDE we can switch
between script editors with very different conceptions of how things
should be done (and those conceptions have been narrowed because
Runrev was inspired to adopt some of the ideas used in GLX2). From day
one, it has always been one of the things I liked about Runrev's
product - that the whole development environment was scripts on top of
the engine.  It is only now after a decade or more of DHTML that we
are seeing web IDEs running in the browser: http://maqetta.org/ (and
that has probably taken millions of hours of "free" programmer time +
the resources of IBM, and it is still far from satisfactory).

Kickstarter looks to me like it is shaking things up.  People with
ideas who would have previously had trouble raising money are able to
"crowdsource" their financing.  Of course, Light Table might never
really get off the ground.


Bernard

On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 10:24 AM, Glen Bojsza <gbojsza at gmail.com> wrote:
> Back in the early 2000 pythonware was formed by several prominent leaders in the python community.
>
> It was delivering an IDE for python...I actually was one of the first and few who bought a license.
>
> They eventually shut down. From a conversation with one of the founders I learnt that people expected anything and everything dealing with python to be free. Ergo the business model failed.
>
> I still have the t-shirt that came with the license :-)
>
>
> Glen