Rety – Live coding without the stress | Hacker News Reader

Rety – Live coding without the stress

rety.verou.me

64 pointsskilled10 comments

> It offered the same progressive development which is the primary benefit of live coding, but none of the fumbling, delays, or mistakes that often come with it.

Is the fumbling necessarily bad? I actually think it's important for my students to see me making "stupid" mistakes, and to see the process of fixing them. (I can see how this might be different at a conference versus a class.)

It's nice for people like me that fear doing mistakes during talks, they may need to give at some point.

I could see myself scripting a talk and run it, while focusing on explanations.

I don't feel very comfortable getting all the attention. Having a thing less to worry is definitely adding some peace to it.

Would that not cut off the possibility of live questions? I always prefer learning from teachers who stop & start, and are flexible enough to incorporate difference from the script in their demonstrations.

If you use a terminal-based editor, you can also use asciinema.org.

You probably could have just stepped through an ex script. Also it's not really live coding if it's pre recorded.

Agreed. You lose all the benefits of live coding, imo. This is a way to fake live coding for an image of capability, but there's no point. You may as well just scroll through your already-typed code, if you're going to use this.

> You may as well just scroll through your already-typed code, if you're going to use this.

I don't think so. There's something very different between seeing as code appears and just looking at the prewritten block of it trying to focus on the parts you are supposed to focus on.

there's a basic linux utility or hack that allows you to type on the keyboard, but instead of what you type, each keystroke simply prints the next character from a predetermined string.

the idea is you can mash up keys like in films and have text appear af if you were typing properly.

can anyone remember what this is? I've been racking my brain with no success

how is this useful outside of IDEs?

As she mentions this enables pre-recording live coding to be used while giving or looking at presentations later. I.e: on a live coding page that's part of the web page based presentation, not in an IDE. She's a web and CSS champion so I imagine that's why she likes to take this approach.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com