As a programmer, I am tempted to say “unless the project is actually a large program”. “Large” is relative, of course.
Of course, I have seen LightTable before the comment on LW, and I tried to imagine applying it to any basically data-crunching (as oppposed to mostly UI) program. Visualising computation may look like a good idea. Unfortunately, at the level it is demonstrated in the demo, it is simple enough for anyone who even tries to write a big program to keep it in mind.
When you have multiple layers of abstraction and each of them has a reason to do non-trivial double loops (which is not that much if you can say what each level is doing and why) what we see in demo would become overcluttered. I am not sure whether LightTable demo will grow into a tool to make UI fine-tuning more comfortable or it will try to invent some approaches that work for back-ends and isolated data-crunching. In the former case it will stay a niche thing but may become a well-olished narrow-focus tool. In the latter case it will have to transform so much that it is hard to tell whether the current developer will succeed.
It sounds like it might be a useful program for any complicated project, even if the project isn’t a program.
As a programmer, I am tempted to say “unless the project is actually a large program”. “Large” is relative, of course.
Of course, I have seen LightTable before the comment on LW, and I tried to imagine applying it to any basically data-crunching (as oppposed to mostly UI) program. Visualising computation may look like a good idea. Unfortunately, at the level it is demonstrated in the demo, it is simple enough for anyone who even tries to write a big program to keep it in mind.
When you have multiple layers of abstraction and each of them has a reason to do non-trivial double loops (which is not that much if you can say what each level is doing and why) what we see in demo would become overcluttered. I am not sure whether LightTable demo will grow into a tool to make UI fine-tuning more comfortable or it will try to invent some approaches that work for back-ends and isolated data-crunching. In the former case it will stay a niche thing but may become a well-olished narrow-focus tool. In the latter case it will have to transform so much that it is hard to tell whether the current developer will succeed.