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Really nice.

Rediscovering Lisp and Smalltalk interactive environments.




According to Bret in his "Inventing on Principle", a REPL is not enough interactivity :P


Except the original Lisp and Smalltalk environments are much more than a simple REPL.

Sometimes I wish people would learn about computing history.

Presentation from Kalman Reti about Lisp Machines, check the interactivity starting at 00:44:00 and how to introduce mouse sensitive images at 01:00:00

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=932

Xerox presentations about Smalltalk-80

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLPiMl8XUKU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODZBL80JPqw


For me "more-than-REPL" just looks like a code visualization tool where you can jump between symbolics. Mouse sensitive images looks just like a prototype of AutoCAD

screenshot if anyone is interested.

http://i.imgur.com/FjaDFgi.png

http://i.imgur.com/sGNN3la.png

Bret Victor's work is much, much more impressive, you can change variable values and see results in realtime. In that Mario game example, you can see Mario's trajectory and adjust values to see how physical parameters affect the height and distance Mario can jump, and modify gravity ticking equation to see Mario jump & walking up-side-down.


I am not saying his work is not great, far from it.

What I mean is that these ideas were already present in such environments.

The "more-than-REPL" stated by me, means that these environments allowed for an interactive type of work that went further than a simple textual REPL.

Many young HN readers tend to associate REPL to the pure REPL textual version they have access to, while using vi and emacs on their UNIX boxes.


You could do that on a Lisp Machine, too. Symbolics sold a complete interactive animation and game development system. Nintendo used it in the early years. The software later got ported.


Ya, parent is just living in the past.


Parent is an old dog that gets amazed how little HN young kids know about computer history.


Parent really thinks Smalltalk had the capabilities, realized or not, to do the demos that Bret did in Inventing on Principle. Smalltalk and Lisp have never shown the capability, and in fact just can't do it. Time travel was just never a big thing there.

The Smalltalkers do this all the time; I had even Ralph Johnson poo hoo my 2007 live programming talk. But you get the feeling that these people really think nothing new can be invented after the 80s. They say "Smalltalk" already does this! And you say "show me" and then they just shut up.


Well for starts it is a bit hard to get a Xerox system at the shop around the corner.

Second, I mentioned it was a good idea to follow these ideas.

My only point is that they aren't new and many live programming advocates sell them as if they were new.


All the ideas presented in Christopher Hancock's 2003 dissertation on live programming are compared adequately against previous work. There are plenty of advocates out there for anything that don't do their homework and don't bother with related/previous work sections...only academics like us concern ourselves with that.




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