Good work.
Although Bret Victor deserves lots of appreciation for his work, most of his ideas are actually how Xerox PARC workstations and Lisp Machines used to enable developers to program more productively.
So if anything the best part of his work is making young generations aware of what the industry lost when those systems failed to gain wide market acceptance.
Lisp may have been the first language with a REPL (as far as I'm aware it was either Lisp or Forth), but REPLs have evolved over the years, and plenty of modern programmers were familiar with REPLs before Bret Victor's views on instant feedback became popular.
It was a graphical REPL that could embedd live objects, which were still active to further interactive changes.
Also the ability to have the whole OS exposed via the REPLs is hardly available in modern systems.
Not alk REPLs are made alike.
So, we actually did lose some things with the new and shiny REPLs - Macros.
No debating your statement that there are other good programming environments with other shiny features^^
I've used the Jupyter emacs integration (https://github.com/millejoh/emacs-ipython-notebook) but in the end, I stuck with org mode.
For an example of what you can do in org mode (in emacs), here is part of a "dashboard" I created for one of my products: https://i.imgur.com/QUFbIBk.png
And an example of how I design: https://i.imgur.com/MeRYn1L.png
You can essentially use org-babel to recreate an approximation to the notebook environment which si cool
With hydrogen, are there cells? What happens if I want to rerun everything? Will I get no output except the output of the last line?
> Will I get no output except the output of the last line?
If the return value is one line, it prints neatly after the executed block. If it's more than one it inserts a little pane with the results, with options to copy the data or open it in a new buffer.
While it doesn't currently exist, someone might implement something like this for Sublime Text in the future.
There is already discussion about Jupyter lab here on the front page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12098180
This is the first example I've seen of the power that using Electron in Atom can give, and it makes me super exited!
I regularly included build steps as comments in the first few lines of C and Pascal sources. No makefile necessary.
You could also arrange for code to run on actions like 'cd' (to set up environments, for instance; your editor window could become a context of readily selectable commands based on the directory you were in).
Oh, and 1987.
Emacs is a very polarising environment and there are many programmers for whom it is simply not the right code editor.
I do recognize, however, that being tied to emacs (the only complete implementation of org-mode / org-Babel today) is a liability. I wonder if some smart person will figure out a portable implementation in something else. Of course, it won't match the flexibility or extensibility of emacs, but perhaps it can still surpass Jupyter / RMarkdown.
I mention RMarkdown together with Jupyter simply because org-mode / org-Babel nearly addresses both the dynamic notebook use case as well as the document publishing use case (including nice academic feature like cross-references, which aren't supported in Markdown).
There are issues with Jupyter in that distro too, But hydrogen had some nps js error regarding a missing lib or something. So many stacks in these things...
Suppose you had Jupyter installed using the following process:
https://www.dataquest.io/blog/digitalocean-docker-data-scien...
Often times the result of running some bit of code is to see the end result in a browser because the code resulted in sending a bunch of HTML or JSON as a response.
Also in the above case your code isn't self contained to a block of code. Chances are you have a web server, along with a database and cache server. Most of my projects are also encapsulated in half a dozen Docker containers. How is this plugin going to know what to do with that?
Starting up an entire stack of programs to live preview a few lines of code would end up being slower than just saving the file and reloading the browser to see feedback.
I only glanced the top of the README which compares the project to what Light Table was trying to solve and then showed an animated gif of inline code evaluation examples.
The dark one isn't really ideal for a cell-by-cell Jupyter-like implementation
I certainly would be interested. I started using VS Code more and more and VIM less and less :(
