Chris Granger

Light Table - a new IDE concept

Light Table is now open source

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…

Eve Version 0

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…

Light Table 0.4 released

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 into NodeJS and…

Light Table's Numbers, And What's Happening Next

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:

Light Table is in YCS12

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.

It's Playtime - Light Table Playground released

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

A new Light Table experience

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…

Meet the new Light Table

We have to start with a picture. Or hey, just go download it and see for yourself.

The future is specific

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.

Coding is not the new literacy

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.

Toward a better programming

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…

Light Table reaches 0.1.0

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.

Beyond Light Table

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:

Is Web3 anything?

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.

Cancer and Startups

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…

Light Table 0.5.0

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 vertical menu), to reaching the point…

Light Table Playground Levels Up

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.

On concepts and realities

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…

Light Table - Embracing Abstraction

Bret Victor's live editable game in ClojureScript

Taking Bret Victor's notion of connecting to your creation and turning it into a ClojureScript live game editor.

Light Table a year ago

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…

The IDE as a value

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: