I'm guessing you are talking about the visual feedback/debugging with Swift and Xcode? If I were a betting man, I'd guess that these ideas are too useful to be unique, and that we will start to see them more.
Also, I think that the LT team had said that they couldn't achieve as much feedback as they wanted to without developing a new language (that I'm guessing is a bit more progressive than Swift) in order to allow for a more interactive experience.
So, with no insider info, I'm guessing that if they hadn't started developing their own language they may have been leapfrogged, but given that they don't really have to language design constraints around Cocoa/Objective-C semantics maybe they are still pretty far ahead. The harder part is getting enough programmers to care, even if they come out with something really revolutionary.
Yeah, we're working on something much more interesting than Swift, which while cool appears to be just more of the same thing we have now. We've questioned a lot of assumptions and come up with a system that is very different than the way we tend to think of programming currently. The benefits you get from going outside of that box are pretty crazy and we're working furiously to get to the point where we can start showing it to people.
> The harder part is getting enough programmers to care, even if they come out with something really revolutionary.
That's true, but even programmers will have a hard time ignoring some of the claims we'll be able to make :)
In any case, our work on Light Table is a small step compared to where things are headed and at the very least, I can promise there are interesting times ahead.
These are certainly some bold claims, love the confidence and excited to see what you guys have up your sleeves. Hadn't heard you all were working on anything outside of Light Table.
Some of the design goals for the new language (which seems to be called Aurora) are outlined in a recent post on the Light Table blog. Definitely some exciting stuff.
If you only want to write Swift, yeah. LT is supporting Python, JS, Clojure and ClojureScript. (And others?) And I don't know anything about editor extensibility in Xcode in general or Playgrounds in particular.
