As just a plain editor, it's hard to compete with vim/emacs/sublime. The interesting things LT offered were around connecting to running pieces of software and the truth is that we just ran against a wall in what we can do with our current languages. That's why Apple's effort with Swift is so important: they're designing the language to be tooled. We didn't have that benefit and along the way we learned that it actually wouldn't help that much anyways.
Any single tool is going to be an incremental improvement (at best) on programming, because the source of the issues is really the model itself. My suspicion is that programming is going to change substantially over the next decade, because while we've been worried about machine learning, rails, and hadoop, the notion of the machine changed out from under us. We're already starting to hit a wall as a result of that - reasoning about highly concurrent systems with the programming models we have now is nearly impossible. If we continue pushing LT for that way of thinking, it's unlikely to make much of a difference. Instead, there's an opportunity to embrace that change and take the ideas of LT to their logical conclusion: what would a stack built for today's machine that is meant to be used by humans look like? We stumbled on a solution as we did more and more user testing of LT and in the interest of self preservation we ran with it.
More practically, though, incremental improvements are hard to sell - not just to VCistan, but to programmers as well. Hell, even orders of magnitude improvements are hard to sell to programmers. We'd have no way of sustaining ourselves if we couldn't find some avenue to eventually turn this into a business - we looked and couldn't really find a reasonably quick way to do that. Matching the millions of man hours that have been poured into vim/emacs and so on is just not in the cards for a couple of guys with not much funding. Plus it seems programmers are increasingly less interested in paying for anything in general, so that didn't make our prospects all that attractive. With Eve there's a much clearer path towards creating a sustainable business that is able to continue towards the ridiculous goal we set out with from the beginning: to empower the world's creators.
We use LT every day. Lots of other people do too. It fills an important part of the ecosystem and we hope it continues to infect other tools and organizations who have significantly greater resources than a couple of guys in SF. But either way we will do our best to make sure that it continues. Unfortunately, though, it just can't be our primary focus - both because I think that would be focusing on the wrong part of the problem and because at the end of the day we have to pay ourselves and there's just no way for us to do that.
I really appreciate this reply, I think most people would have ducked the question and moved on.
I still think that LT is going to slowly peter out, as there isn't enough momentum to dethrone existing IDEs / upcoming actively developed contenders.
That said, I think this level of transparency about where your collective heads are at is great. While some people may still be annoyed (particularly those who donated to the kickstarter) I applaud your willingness to change paths and do what you think needs to be done to succeed.
The fact that you're moving on from Light Table is perfectly fine. The problem is that you're not bothering to provide any sort of handover strategy.
A lot of people are interested in the project, would like to contribute to it, and would be happy to take over where you left off. However, this is difficult to do due to lack of documentation and any support from yourself.
Since you're not going to be actively working on the project, why not involve the community find individuals or an organization that would continue developing and maintaining it.
Surely, this is not too much to ask and it would be a responsible way to transition from the project.
I have stated from the beginning that I'm more than happy to get people more involved. When it has come up before I've said I'd gladly give people commit rights. There are only a couple of people who have contributed with any degree of frequency where that would make sense - Josh Cole and Mike Innes come to mind, for example.
I will certainly not stand in the way of the community and we're more than happy to help maintain.
My point was that the community needs more support from you in order to be able to contribute meaningfully. This involves actively finding people who would be willing to take over the project and working with them to help them get started.
Simply dropping the code on GitHub and saying that you're glad for people to get involved is not a sufficient level of support at this point. This might've worked when the project was younger and smaller, but it's just too big for people to be able to dive into now. The links I provided are a prime example of the problem.
Since you found the time to make a blog post about Eve, surely you could also make a post stating that you're looking to hand over Light Table and you'd like to help facilitate the transition.
As someone who dug in far enough to write a simple plugin and then backed straight out again with no wish to go back I agree completely. If the plan is that LT should survive then I do not think simply open sourcing it is going to be enough; it needs the core team to do at least a final push on getting the fundamentals right, clarifying the internal api's, and documenting the way forward. Then maybe the community can take over. As it is, I'm not hopeful.
I'm really excited to see what comes out of this, because I have no doubt that it's possible to come up with both better programming models and better environments to support them. That said:
a) More "traditional" languages aren't going anywhere, at least for the next few decades, however successful Eve is.
b) The idea of really connecting to the running program has a huge amount of potential, even in these languages. Less potential than Eve? Perhaps, but I don't believe for a second that we've hit that wall yet (and I wholly intend on proving that with continued work on the Julia plugin).
Leaving Light Table unfinished would be a travesty, even if it is only an incremental improvement – but it sounds like you'll at least treat it as an important side project, which is something. Best of luck with Eve, anyway.
Every time I dig into how Xerox PARC systems worked, my own experience with Smalltalk and Oberon, and then look for what we have, I always think we could have had so much better developer experiences if those technologies had succeeded in the market.
How much math do you know? Specifically of the type theory/domain theory/category theory variety. How many process calculi are you familiar with? Just curious.
I personally don't have much of a math background, but Jamie does (he went to Cambridge for it). FWIW, Eve is actually very heavily based on mathematics and using first principles there to guide us to a solution that is backed by more than just intuition.
Do you think you'll have enough time to improve on the documentation and plugin APIs in LT?
Whenever I've used it I've felt like a small amount of effort in those aspects will allow it to continue to progress in the hands of the plugin community.
Any single tool is going to be an incremental improvement (at best) on programming, because the source of the issues is really the model itself. My suspicion is that programming is going to change substantially over the next decade, because while we've been worried about machine learning, rails, and hadoop, the notion of the machine changed out from under us. We're already starting to hit a wall as a result of that - reasoning about highly concurrent systems with the programming models we have now is nearly impossible. If we continue pushing LT for that way of thinking, it's unlikely to make much of a difference. Instead, there's an opportunity to embrace that change and take the ideas of LT to their logical conclusion: what would a stack built for today's machine that is meant to be used by humans look like? We stumbled on a solution as we did more and more user testing of LT and in the interest of self preservation we ran with it.
More practically, though, incremental improvements are hard to sell - not just to VCistan, but to programmers as well. Hell, even orders of magnitude improvements are hard to sell to programmers. We'd have no way of sustaining ourselves if we couldn't find some avenue to eventually turn this into a business - we looked and couldn't really find a reasonably quick way to do that. Matching the millions of man hours that have been poured into vim/emacs and so on is just not in the cards for a couple of guys with not much funding. Plus it seems programmers are increasingly less interested in paying for anything in general, so that didn't make our prospects all that attractive. With Eve there's a much clearer path towards creating a sustainable business that is able to continue towards the ridiculous goal we set out with from the beginning: to empower the world's creators.
We use LT every day. Lots of other people do too. It fills an important part of the ecosystem and we hope it continues to infect other tools and organizations who have significantly greater resources than a couple of guys in SF. But either way we will do our best to make sure that it continues. Unfortunately, though, it just can't be our primary focus - both because I think that would be focusing on the wrong part of the problem and because at the end of the day we have to pay ourselves and there's just no way for us to do that.