Apart from a sparser screen, the heart is "instant feedback".
There are challenges in scaling this up from the demo, but I want to see what can be done - it's Research and Development, not simple implementation. Chris Granger has a solid background for this (on the Visual Studio team). And working code. :-)
IMHO there are obviously solutions to these problems, but I'm not sure how graceful/usable they'll be. Maybe great; maybe just a significant improvement; maybe just good for some niche cases - we'll see!
Firstly, we can sandbox - including the file-system; even make a copy, so it runs without "really" changing anything (in the limit, there's virtualization).
Second, some of these problems are common to testing, where mocking is a standard solution to the same problem of wanting to run just some code. [Perhaps a significant result will be a way of auto-mocking?] And even if you don't Test, you still run code to see if it's working - this is the same; just faster. How do you control what code you run? Light Table can incorporate the same techniques.
OTOH, I run code with ctrl-tab, up-arrow + return. It's pretty fast. Easing the setup of that would be good though.
The full version is not going be as magical as the demo; but it seems unlikely that current IDE tech has reached perfection, and cannot be improved upon...
Firstly, we can sandbox - including the file-system; even make a copy, so it runs without "really" changing anything (in the limit, there's virtualization). Second, some of these problems are common to testing, where mocking is a standard solution to the same problem of wanting to run just some code. [Perhaps a significant result will be a way of auto-mocking?] And even if you don't Test, you still run code to see if it's working - this is the same; just faster. How do you control what code you run? Light Table can incorporate the same techniques. OTOH, I run code with ctrl-tab, up-arrow + return. It's pretty fast. Easing the setup of that would be good though.
The full version is not going be as magical as the demo; but it seems unlikely that current IDE tech has reached perfection, and cannot be improved upon...