Wednesday, October 31, 2012

EclipseFP: first timid step towards live programming

The title is sensationalist. All I've done is tweak a bit how we interface between GHCi and the Eclipse debugging framework. What that allows now (in the development version of EclipseFP) is to have expressions (in the Debug Expressions View) evaluated even if you're not stopped at a breakpoint.
So when you work directly in GHCi, you type in expressions to check the results. But when you change some code and hit :reload, your bindings are lost, you need to retype the expressions. EclipseFP does all that for you.

I've posted a video of a simple session in action on YouTube. It's my first video ever! It just shows a trivial arithmetic function being changed and how the result refreshes as soon as you select back the running program in the Debug view. Best viewed large...

3 comments:

neo said...

Great job! :) I think it would be cool to make another video with breakpoints and maybe a bigger example. Also, think about recording it in higher resolution, it's a bit nicer to watch.

JP Moresmau said...

I agree, but I'm not too sure how to get a better resolution, I'm only starting to play with CamStudio...

Unknown said...

Awesome video. I definitely think videos are the way to go for illustrating new features. Having a set of videos for newbies would also be useful, starting from the eclipsefp installation right to writing their first "hello world" application.