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 Sat Dec 12 2009 - 00:32:56 GMT