from Hacker News

Show HN: A Demo IDE for Scheme

by kennethfriedman on 7/26/19, 8:10 PM with 17 comments

  • by kennethfriedman on 7/27/19, 3:41 AM

    OP here.

    This IDE started as a final project in Gerry Sussman's LISP class at MIT.

    When programming and debugging, you often want to know what your code is going to do without the possibility of unintended side effects (state change) by actually running the code.

    Towards this goal, we added a concept we call "preview execution." That is: you can preview the output of code in our IDE simply by highlighting a section of code. The IDE will show the output of the highlighted section, but when you de-select the section, there are no side effects: no state is changed in the Scheme instance.

    It's downloadable as a Mac app, but also open source. Would love to hear people's thoughts on it!

  • by 0xferruccio on 7/27/19, 11:42 AM

    You might find the work Chris Granger did on Light Table quite interesting ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H58-n7uldoU )

    I really liked the first version and did some research some time ago on how to make this usable by a wider audience: https://ferrucc.io/posts/a-new-ide/

  • by dap232 on 7/27/19, 7:07 AM

    This one shows function calls and linked lists in case you find it interesting: http://davidpilo.com/pvts/

  • by jedberg on 7/27/19, 6:53 AM

    It says "Can't find scheme, contact the developer". I figure I'd contact you here so that others can see the answer too.

    I have MIT scheme installed on the system. How do I tell it where to find Scheme?

    Or better yet, any chance you can just package up the interpreter with the IDE, or make that an optional download?

  • by gkbrk on 7/27/19, 5:30 AM

    Not sure if there's anything wrong with the page or not, but when I visited it locked up my machine and used a lot of RAM until Firefox killed the tab.

  • by FraserGreenlee on 7/27/19, 12:48 PM

    The previewing execution is cool, reminds me of my Python debugger https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=fraser.l...

  • by dimitar on 7/27/19, 9:49 AM

    Preview execution is pretty cool. Looks similar to the instarepl from nightcode: https://sekao.net/nightcode/

  • by Y_Y on 7/27/19, 7:21 AM

    Isn't such a thing already possible in emacs?