I have made a little live-coding experiment that is primarily inspired by Mathematica notepad, Bret Victor’s Inventing on Principle and has being pioneered by othe cool projects like light table.
I do write JS & HTML every single day and I can’t even imagine doing that without a REPL. Although scratchpad made me realized how I hate loop part of REPL! Another problem is an amount of time one needs to waste, while being inspired, to get a glimpse of an idea, live on a screen. Creating HTML, JS files wiring them with each other, page refreshes, etc… I’m sure we can do better than that, here is a little demo of what I think it should be like:
You can give it a try yourself or check out the code on github.
This expreiment was done in a couple of hours, so it’s far from being stable. It has bunch of known bugs than I need to fix, but I still hope it was worth sharing.
Making this would have being impossible without awesome open source projects like codemirror & browserify who’m I wish to give a good credit.
Finally I really hope to see Scratchpad picking up some of this soon!