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This is the same man, Chris Granger, that did a Kickstarter for Light Table, a so-called "next generation IDE," with promotional materials touting as new and re

This is the same man, Chris Granger, that did a Kickstarter for Light Table, a so-called "next generation IDE," with promotional materials touting as new and revolutionary features that had been standard in IntelliJ, Visual Studio, and even Eclipse for years: http://chrononsystems.com/blog/light-table-concept-vs-reality http://chrononsystems.com/blog/light-table-concept-vs-realit... Light Table was also ultimately abandoned before completion. Perhaps Granger should rein in his ambitions somewhat, or at least try to delegate more (assuming there are enough people to whom he can delegate)?

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
You are being a bit harsh. These were ambitious undertakings with high levels of risk going into them, which, I bet, were well known. I've struggled in this field for 10+ years now and there are lots of dark alley ways that end in walls. Then everyone constantly tells you this has already been done when, no, it really hasn't (at best, the technology is there but so piss poor designed that it isn't useful). If you reign in your ambition, well, isn't that why innovation in the programming experience field is so stagnant (basically stuck at the Smalltalk level) in the first place? We should be free from disdain to take risks, possibly lose, with a chance of hitting it big.
- steelmanning 9y ago
  > You are being a bit harsh I know, and I rewrote my post several times before submitting it, trying to minimize the harshness. But the pattern with Granger is pretty obvious, isn't it? Grandiose ambitions, over-commitment, and a resulting failure to ship.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    There have been plenty of people out there with grand visions who tried and failed the first few times. Then either they give up and tone down their visions, or they keep trying and perhaps eventually succeed. LightTable and Eve are still very influential and inspiring even if they aren't successful. I am personally glad they existed, as they provide experience and lessons for future efforts.
    - flukus 9y ago
      > There have been plenty of people out there with grand visions who tried and failed the first few times. Most of them a con men, selling something they know will never work, especially on kickstarter and the like. This was nothing unique, it's something people have been trying to do since computers were invented and it has failed every single time. COBOL was conceived with the idea that people in other disciplines would be able to do their own programming. When there is every reason to think you will fail and you ask people for money to try then you start to look a lot like those con men.
  - pbiggar 9y ago
    The problem I have with your statement is that you are attributing something to somebody about which you know nothing, based on almost no information. A less asshole-y phrasing would be "I wonder if he had reduced his ambitions somewhat, it might have had more chance to succeed".
  - felipelemos 9y ago
    And what's the problem with that? I think he (and everybody else) is free to have whatever dream they want, since they did not try to deceive others.
  - portlander12345 9y ago
    It’s called research.
- dman 9y ago
  +1 - Watching from the sidelines I admire the work both from you and Chris. It is incredibly hard to move away from the current local maximum because of network effects.
  - infinite8s 9y ago
    Not only network effects, but path dependence due to the hegemony of our current hardware/software stack.
- bachmeier 9y ago
  This is (in principle, at least) why we have public funding of basic research.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Which right now is mostly going to the deep learning train :(. There are some academics working in this area right now, Ravi Chugh, Phillip Guo, to name a couple.
    - didibus 9y ago
      Isn't generalized AI and even more ambitious long term goal though? Why program anything, just tell the computer what you want and he'll make it for you.
      - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        That's funny, since Engelbart's work in the mother of all demos was seen as irrelevant by much of the CS community at the time because they thought generalized AI was just around the corner! After a 2 or 3 AI winters, they changed their minds. Generalized AI is like practical fusion, always 20 years away. I mean, it will come eventually, but until then...there is still value in making humans better.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  As a side note, and as someone else working in this space, you do yourself a disservice by telling yourself work in this space is stagnant since SmallTalk. It’s not that programming ergonomics are stagnant, it’s that all of the gains have been made by professionals. And the tooling is nearly impossible to leverage for a beginner environment because all of the assumptions of a pro developer are built in to their design. The innovations are there, Heroku, Git, CSS, Markdown... these are all triumphs of programming ergonomics. They’re just all inevitably coopted by professional “Foundations” and amended to the maximum level a Pro developer can handle. JavaScript is almost useless for beginners now because the tooling is so complex, but full time front end devs can crank out HTTP packets like no ones business. So you will need to watch those developments and lean on their ideas and some of the low level tooling if you ever hope to build a beginner environment. But you can’t use the tools themselves. Still, if you start with SmallTalk you will fail. If Chris Granger and Bret Victor started their and failed, you will fail too, because those guys are rockstars. You need to take the ideas being tested in the Pro tools and use them, without adopting the Pro implementations or even the interfaces. It’s or easy.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    None of those are interesting experiences beyond the command line. They represent exactly the stagnant thinking that we are fighting against. Especially GIT, it could have come out in the 70s with the interface it relies on. It makes me sad that people see this as progress. It doesn’t take a rockstar to make progress here, and anyways, I’ve been relatively successful on the academic side (e.g. just got a 10 year influential paper award for my 2007 live programming paper). I don’t think Bret Victor failed so much as lost interest, and he accomplished a great deal in getting people interested in this area again. Chris hasn’t really failed either, he is still young. And let’s not forget all the ex-HARCers... Also, not all of us see this as a make programming more accessible problem; e.g. that’s not my thing, I really want to improve programming en masse. But we all agree the existing way is a dead end and we need to experiment ei5h radically different approaches.
    - PyComfy 9y ago
      Interesting experiences beyond the command line are game development tools; Each iteration try to make the barrier between artists/content creators and programmers thinner. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXSKGYQvZsI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXSKGYQvZsI
gojomo 9y ago
Can you describe the right-sized ambitions and effective delegation practices that have served you well in your career, perhaps with examples of the resulting successes?
- steelmanning 9y ago
  When you have a failed Kickstarter under your belt, that's a good indication you need to aim lower.
  - ModernMech 9y ago
    How was Light Table a failed kickstarter? It got funded and Chris delivered exactly what he said he would. You can go and use Light Table today. The reason he stopped working on it was the realization that his ultimate vision for Light Table is something exactly like Eve, and would be impossible with languages like JS, Pyhton, and Clojure.
  - gojomo 9y ago
    Can you provide pointers to your successful kickstarters, or other projects where lowering your aim created success?
  - dang 9y ago
    Since this is your third such comment, it seems that you created this account for personal attack. That's obviously a bannable offense, so I've banned the account. Please don't create HN accounts to break the site guidelines with. We like HN users who like Smalltalk, but not being an asshole is more important. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
saywatnow 9y ago
My opinion is almost the opposite: I find Granger's ambitious ideas and presentations stimulating, and I like that they're out there to inspire people to imagine more and experiment more agressively. I wish his audiences were a bit less credulous though. Experiments like Light Table and Eve are just that: interesting and potentially useful explorations of design space, but as unlikely as anything else to radically change the discipline of programming overnight.
ibdknox 9y ago
Perhaps, but it's pretty easy to make judgements from the sideline about what people should or shouldn't do. I was the PM on Visual Studio. I can assure the things I showed in Light Table weren't there. Nor were they in Eclipse, as I studied that as well. You can pick and choose any number of things from our work over the years and say "Hey, but this looks like that" - I'm sure it does, but the question is does it work like that? Does it enable you the way the things we showed did? > Light Table was also ultimately abandoned before completion. Unfortunately even after paying ourselves only just enough to live in the area (around 40% of what my peers were paid), we needed to find a way to eat. No software is ever done, but we had more than 40,000 people using it and Light Table was a stated influence on tools at Apple, Google, and Microsoft. We did our best. Was there more to do? Of course, there always is, but at some point we had to make the hard decision to leave LT in the hands of the community. I'm curious what direction you think we should've gone instead? > Perhaps Granger should rein in his ambitions somewhat Maybe, but at the same time, we had people willing to let us try. You paid literally nothing for access to our work, nor to the effects our research had on others, so I'm not sure why there's this much negativity here. We need people testing the fringes because where we are is so far from where we could be. Lots of things did work in Eve and there were cases where we were so much more efficient it hardly felt like we were "programming" at all anymore. We've shared everything we've done and we'll continue telling more people about it in the hope that others can benefit from what we've learned. And yet you're the one acting hurt, while I'm the one having to shutdown the project. That's very different from the HN that rallied us to do our kickstarter in the first place - the one that encouraged innovation and trying to do crazy things in the off chance that they work. There's so much more to do and I sincerely hope HN doesn't become so cynical and demeaning that it's not worth sharing people's efforts here.
- j4ship 9y ago
  hes basing it on evidence ... weather its easy or not (its an opinion, im not sure what the ease or difficulty of the statment matters) it seems accurate. Maybe some counter evidence like your knowledge of how hard he/the team works? They try they failed ... and op is suggesting get some wins under your belt first. I dont things hes "acting hurt". You are acting hurt, and taking a criticism personally instead of for what it is. A reasonable statement. This makes me see why the project failed ... surrounded by yes men that cant see the flaw and are focused on things like "how many people use it" rather than "why would anyone pay for this" classic
rntz 9y ago
Your comment is inconsistent with itself. If LightTable's features "had been standard in IntelliJ, Visual Studio, and even Eclipse for years", how is that evidence that Granger et al were being overly ambitious? Wouldn't it suggest exactly the opposite? Vice-versa, if LightTable was overly ambitious, wouldn't that mean it tried to do things that were (too far) beyond the scope of existing technology?
dang 9y ago
This crosses into personal attack, which isn't ok at any time on Hacker News, let alone kicking someone when they're down. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this again.
murukesh_s 9y ago
He raised a seed funding for a programming language, that itself deserves credit. I think with your attitude, many innovators would have quit from their first or second try? Get a life buddy.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago

You are being a bit harsh. These were ambitious undertakings with high levels of risk going into them, which, I bet, were well known. I've struggled in this field for 10+ years now and there are lots of dark alley ways that end in walls. Then everyone constantly tells you this has already been done when, no, it really hasn't (at best, the technology is there but so piss poor designed that it isn't useful). If you reign in your ambition, well, isn't that why innovation in the programming experience field is so stagnant (basically stuck at the Smalltalk level) in the first place? We should be free from disdain to take risks, possibly lose, with a chance of hitting it big.

steelmanning 9y ago
> You are being a bit harsh I know, and I rewrote my post several times before submitting it, trying to minimize the harshness. But the pattern with Granger is pretty obvious, isn't it? Grandiose ambitions, over-commitment, and a resulting failure to ship.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  There have been plenty of people out there with grand visions who tried and failed the first few times. Then either they give up and tone down their visions, or they keep trying and perhaps eventually succeed. LightTable and Eve are still very influential and inspiring even if they aren't successful. I am personally glad they existed, as they provide experience and lessons for future efforts.
  - flukus 9y ago
    > There have been plenty of people out there with grand visions who tried and failed the first few times. Most of them a con men, selling something they know will never work, especially on kickstarter and the like. This was nothing unique, it's something people have been trying to do since computers were invented and it has failed every single time. COBOL was conceived with the idea that people in other disciplines would be able to do their own programming. When there is every reason to think you will fail and you ask people for money to try then you start to look a lot like those con men.
- pbiggar 9y ago
  The problem I have with your statement is that you are attributing something to somebody about which you know nothing, based on almost no information. A less asshole-y phrasing would be "I wonder if he had reduced his ambitions somewhat, it might have had more chance to succeed".
- felipelemos 9y ago
  And what's the problem with that? I think he (and everybody else) is free to have whatever dream they want, since they did not try to deceive others.
- portlander12345 9y ago
  It’s called research.
dman 9y ago
+1 - Watching from the sidelines I admire the work both from you and Chris. It is incredibly hard to move away from the current local maximum because of network effects.
- infinite8s 9y ago
  Not only network effects, but path dependence due to the hegemony of our current hardware/software stack.
bachmeier 9y ago
This is (in principle, at least) why we have public funding of basic research.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Which right now is mostly going to the deep learning train :(. There are some academics working in this area right now, Ravi Chugh, Phillip Guo, to name a couple.
  - didibus 9y ago
    Isn't generalized AI and even more ambitious long term goal though? Why program anything, just tell the computer what you want and he'll make it for you.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      That's funny, since Engelbart's work in the mother of all demos was seen as irrelevant by much of the CS community at the time because they thought generalized AI was just around the corner! After a 2 or 3 AI winters, they changed their minds. Generalized AI is like practical fusion, always 20 years away. I mean, it will come eventually, but until then...there is still value in making humans better.
erikpukinskis 9y ago
As a side note, and as someone else working in this space, you do yourself a disservice by telling yourself work in this space is stagnant since SmallTalk. It’s not that programming ergonomics are stagnant, it’s that all of the gains have been made by professionals. And the tooling is nearly impossible to leverage for a beginner environment because all of the assumptions of a pro developer are built in to their design. The innovations are there, Heroku, Git, CSS, Markdown... these are all triumphs of programming ergonomics. They’re just all inevitably coopted by professional “Foundations” and amended to the maximum level a Pro developer can handle. JavaScript is almost useless for beginners now because the tooling is so complex, but full time front end devs can crank out HTTP packets like no ones business. So you will need to watch those developments and lean on their ideas and some of the low level tooling if you ever hope to build a beginner environment. But you can’t use the tools themselves. Still, if you start with SmallTalk you will fail. If Chris Granger and Bret Victor started their and failed, you will fail too, because those guys are rockstars. You need to take the ideas being tested in the Pro tools and use them, without adopting the Pro implementations or even the interfaces. It’s or easy.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  None of those are interesting experiences beyond the command line. They represent exactly the stagnant thinking that we are fighting against. Especially GIT, it could have come out in the 70s with the interface it relies on. It makes me sad that people see this as progress. It doesn’t take a rockstar to make progress here, and anyways, I’ve been relatively successful on the academic side (e.g. just got a 10 year influential paper award for my 2007 live programming paper). I don’t think Bret Victor failed so much as lost interest, and he accomplished a great deal in getting people interested in this area again. Chris hasn’t really failed either, he is still young. And let’s not forget all the ex-HARCers... Also, not all of us see this as a make programming more accessible problem; e.g. that’s not my thing, I really want to improve programming en masse. But we all agree the existing way is a dead end and we need to experiment ei5h radically different approaches.
  - PyComfy 9y ago
    Interesting experiences beyond the command line are game development tools; Each iteration try to make the barrier between artists/content creators and programmers thinner. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXSKGYQvZsI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXSKGYQvZsI

gojomo 9y ago

Can you describe the right-sized ambitions and effective delegation practices that have served you well in your career, perhaps with examples of the resulting successes?

steelmanning 9y ago
When you have a failed Kickstarter under your belt, that's a good indication you need to aim lower.
- ModernMech 9y ago
  How was Light Table a failed kickstarter? It got funded and Chris delivered exactly what he said he would. You can go and use Light Table today. The reason he stopped working on it was the realization that his ultimate vision for Light Table is something exactly like Eve, and would be impossible with languages like JS, Pyhton, and Clojure.
- gojomo 9y ago
  Can you provide pointers to your successful kickstarters, or other projects where lowering your aim created success?
- dang 9y ago
  Since this is your third such comment, it seems that you created this account for personal attack. That's obviously a bannable offense, so I've banned the account. Please don't create HN accounts to break the site guidelines with. We like HN users who like Smalltalk, but not being an asshole is more important. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

saywatnow 9y ago

My opinion is almost the opposite: I find Granger's ambitious ideas and presentations stimulating, and I like that they're out there to inspire people to imagine more and experiment more agressively. I wish his audiences were a bit less credulous though. Experiments like Light Table and Eve are just that: interesting and potentially useful explorations of design space, but as unlikely as anything else to radically change the discipline of programming overnight.

ibdknox 9y ago

Perhaps, but it's pretty easy to make judgements from the sideline about what people should or shouldn't do. I was the PM on Visual Studio. I can assure the things I showed in Light Table weren't there. Nor were they in Eclipse, as I studied that as well. You can pick and choose any number of things from our work over the years and say "Hey, but this looks like that" - I'm sure it does, but the question is does it work like that? Does it enable you the way the things we showed did? > Light Table was also ultimately abandoned before completion. Unfortunately even after paying ourselves only just enough to live in the area (around 40% of what my peers were paid), we needed to find a way to eat. No software is ever done, but we had more than 40,000 people using it and Light Table was a stated influence on tools at Apple, Google, and Microsoft. We did our best. Was there more to do? Of course, there always is, but at some point we had to make the hard decision to leave LT in the hands of the community. I'm curious what direction you think we should've gone instead? > Perhaps Granger should rein in his ambitions somewhat Maybe, but at the same time, we had people willing to let us try. You paid literally nothing for access to our work, nor to the effects our research had on others, so I'm not sure why there's this much negativity here. We need people testing the fringes because where we are is so far from where we could be. Lots of things did work in Eve and there were cases where we were so much more efficient it hardly felt like we were "programming" at all anymore. We've shared everything we've done and we'll continue telling more people about it in the hope that others can benefit from what we've learned. And yet you're the one acting hurt, while I'm the one having to shutdown the project. That's very different from the HN that rallied us to do our kickstarter in the first place - the one that encouraged innovation and trying to do crazy things in the off chance that they work. There's so much more to do and I sincerely hope HN doesn't become so cynical and demeaning that it's not worth sharing people's efforts here.

j4ship 9y ago
hes basing it on evidence ... weather its easy or not (its an opinion, im not sure what the ease or difficulty of the statment matters) it seems accurate. Maybe some counter evidence like your knowledge of how hard he/the team works? They try they failed ... and op is suggesting get some wins under your belt first. I dont things hes "acting hurt". You are acting hurt, and taking a criticism personally instead of for what it is. A reasonable statement. This makes me see why the project failed ... surrounded by yes men that cant see the flaw and are focused on things like "how many people use it" rather than "why would anyone pay for this" classic

rntz 9y ago

Your comment is inconsistent with itself. If LightTable's features "had been standard in IntelliJ, Visual Studio, and even Eclipse for years", how is that evidence that Granger et al were being overly ambitious? Wouldn't it suggest exactly the opposite? Vice-versa, if LightTable was overly ambitious, wouldn't that mean it tried to do things that were (too far) beyond the scope of existing technology?

dang 9y ago

This crosses into personal attack, which isn't ok at any time on Hacker News, let alone kicking someone when they're down. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this again.

murukesh_s 9y ago

He raised a seed funding for a programming language, that itself deserves credit. I think with your attitude, many innovators would have quit from their first or second try? Get a life buddy.