On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 1:36 AM, Jacques Chester
<jacques@chester.id.au> wrote:
On 19/01/2010, at 4:32 PM, steve donovan wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 10:18 AM, Christian Tellefsen
> <christian.tellefsen@funcom.com> wrote:
>> That would be an actual Lua state running inside our game.
>
> I like this, because it blurs the old distinction between editing and
> debugging. The old model is that one works on dead source, and then
> runs the live program, perhaps in a debugger. (There may be a fat
> build cycle in between that clears out the human short term memory
> cache ;))
>
> But dynamic languages allow much more creative work flows. One can
> work with the live program, and edit modules which can be loaded into
> that system.
This is how many Lisps work, especially Common Lisp. There's
an "IDE" for Emacs called SLIME which communicates with a
running Lisp instance.
Smalltalk has something similar -- the IDE is, in a sense, the
program.
The downside is that these self-contained universes make clean
deployment and versioning that much harder.
Cheers,
JC.
