This is a good list. Some other things i would put on there...
Lots of support for introspection, seeing what data is flowing through
the system and understanding why it is doing whatever it is doing. For
example, have a button where you can peek in on an expression and find
out what value it recently returned.
Ability to execute pieces of the program in isolation, for testing. I
guess this one is usually solved by a REPL.
Also, control over the execution state is good, like having the
ability to pause or load/save a snapshot. Smalltalk & co are good at
that.
Andy
On Dec 11, 2009, at 4:32 PM, alex <alex_at_lurk.org> wrote:
> 2009/12/11 tom_at_nullpointer.co.uk <tom_at_nullpointer.co.uk>:
>> I was wondering, what do people think distinguishes a livecoding
>> langauge
>> ide from a standard one? Is it just the capability to effectively
>> recompile
>> on any edit? Im pretty sure theres more to it than that but my
>> little brain
>> can't think of specific examples.. help plox?
>
> Interesting question.. I suppose then that the main thing is
> preservation of state, magic so you can recompile without losing data.
> I guess another way of looking at it is that code is interpreted
> straight from source code to output, so you change the source while
> the code is running. You get problems -- what if an edit changes some
> data to an incompatible type? What if a function is deleted while
> it's being run? So trickery has to happen.
>
> Then some live coding IDEs allow the running code to edit the source
> code, like with Thor's nice language or that perl editor I used when I
> had more hair.
>
> Some IDEs have freaky visualisation modes like the ChucK editor.
> Others make the code editor part of the output like fluxus.
>
> Then again probably most general purpose IDEs allow some kind of
> interactive coding but call it 'debug mode' or something. Then
> there's REPL style stuff like UNIX shells. So maybe it's more about
> emphasis than anything. And a built in mute button. And default
> black background for over-projections.
>
> alex
>
> --
> http://yaxu.org/
Received on Sun Dec 13 2009 - 00:03:37 GMT