The most interesting part of this talk was how many dead-ends they hit in the process, and how those dead-ends basically sunk many of the popular notions of how to improve programming.

- Make it like Excel = doesn't pan out

- Make it like English = doesn't pan out

- Make it visual = doesn't pan out

I find the end result (kinda like a Wiki crossed with a Relational DB) intriguing.

This looks incredibly interesting. I'd love to see what a compiler looks like in this system.

It also was interesting to see him mess up the overcharging query I would have liked to see a more realistic debugging situation.

Granger's 'Light Table' was always an experiment in my mind, but I'm kind of sad that he dropped it and moved on to the next 'let's fix' programming thing.

Was it a dead-end?

A co-worker uses it at work exclusively for editing markdown documents. I find that a little funny.

I had great optimism for LightTable, helped Kickstart it, but was disappointed with ultimately for the very reasons he outlined at the beginning of his talk: it couldn't shift me from emacs. It's not religious for me, but I could try and fail two or three times over in the time it took me to boot lighttable, figure out how to load my code, eval it and begin to debug it.

I enjoyed this presentation though. His Eve does strike me as a sort of proto-semantic web, although I'm warier of pouring my optimism into it this time though.

I agree. This is just semantic web. It doesn't solve any problems I have right now with programming.

What are the problems you have with programming?

I'm not sure, I was wondering the same thing. Although the repo seems to still be active[0].

[0]:https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable

It seems there are enough people with modest-enough expectations to carry on the torch. As opposed to the perpetual silver-bullet chasing types.

How does this compare to Logicblox?

Logic Blox is built on some of the same principles

This reminds me a lot of Lotus Notes. Which I guess is no bad thing: it was an amazing environment to work in.

Would it be fair to characterize this as a re-invention of that, or are there significant differences I'm overlooking?

Notes wasn't without it's problems though: version control and data typing being two important ones.

I couldn't but thinking that was John Carmack speaking.

He do sound like John Carmack.

I'm sure you don't like lots of things. The hand drawn stuff is very readable. The demo work is all machine generated.