jasonjmcghee an hour ago

Live development is still so under-explored, and is just so exciting to work with.

One of my favorite talks is "Stop Writing Dead Programs" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ab3ArE8W3s) and touches on a lot of what could be in terms of live development.

Lisp is very well-suited to live development due to code being data, but live development doesn't need to be lispy.

I built a live development extension for Love2D which lets you do graphics livecoding (both lua and glsl) in real-time - every keystroke updating the output, (if a valid program).

https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/livelove

Here are some (early) demos of things you can do with it:

https://gist.github.com/jasonjmcghee/9701aacce85799e0f1c7304...

So many cool things once you break down the barrier between editor and running program.

I've also asked myself the question of, what would a language look like that was natively built for live development, and built out a prototype - though it's definitely a sandbox so haven't posted it anywhere yet, other than demos on mastadon.

  • swah 30 minutes ago

    I guess the prevailing worldview is that "recompile everything and re-run" is good enough if it takes 2 seconds. But agreed that it just "feels" different when you're doing live in lisp... I miss Emacs!

    • Arcanum-XIII 23 minutes ago

      Well, for me it’s not enough because I need to get back to where I was, repeating the same actions so it gets to the same state. With live dev I don’t need this, or a history replay method. I only update the running code. Heck I could also update the in memory var too if so I want.

      It’s good that it’s fast. Still no good enough!

baq 30 minutes ago

Working on a largeish typescript node project right now and no support for recompiling a single function in a live system means I have a good minute of downtime on every change. The lisp paradigm would be so refreshing here.

  • dismalaf 28 minutes ago

    You could always use regular JS and have that...

    • baq 9 minutes ago

      1) over my dead body and 2) it doesn’t make sense for it to be possible in JS and not possible in TS.

taeric an hour ago

Love this. Sketch, in particular, looks really exciting to me. I'll have to take a look into trying it out. I still have dreams of doing some of the ideas in Turtle Geometry on a modern computer.