Eve Developer Diary, March — Part 1: UI

http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2016/06/22/mar1/

by dahjelle • 10 years ago

72 47 10 years ago

teej• 10 years ago

For those confused like myself, this is about Eve, an excel-like development environment from the person who brought you LightTable. This is not about Eve Online.

Duelist• 10 years ago

Thanks. It didn't help that they were talking about moons and planets.

zubairq3• 10 years ago

Yes I can see how the moons and planets could be confusing. They have a bigger range of examples now and also the ui has changed a lot As well

niij• 10 years ago

excel-like development environment

Not to be confused with the Space themed excel-simulator that is Eve Online.

stcredzero2• 10 years ago

I detect confusion. It's Excel that excels at simulating Eve Online. It sounds like Eve would make an even better simulator of Eve Online than Excel, however.

cryptoz• 10 years ago

Someone made a parody web game once that was basically a database view of user and game state. You could insert rows and get points and things, it was a hilarious jab at the whole class of games where the gameplay feels like you're just updating cells in a database. I searched for it but couldn't find it just now, anybody know what I mean?

huhtenberg• 10 years ago

Yep, same here. An Eve Online developer's diary would've made for a very interesting read indeed.

outworlder• 10 years ago

But they do have those. https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/

Some are technical, some are not. But the ones around the time of major tech changes are the most interesting. For instance, when they implemented "time dilation" a few years back.

coldtea3• 10 years ago

Or from the person who got bored and abandoned LightTable as a mere proof of concept compared to the initial grand ambitions.

zubairq3• 10 years ago

Its great to see the regular updates om Eve now. I hope these posts get enough exposure as they used to get when Chris Granger posted them to hacker news himself

cmontella9• 10 years ago

Hi everyone, Corey here from Eve. We've been in the trenches for a while, so I've been working to document a backlog of progress.

A lot has changed even in the ~3 months since the work in this post occurred, so it's not reflective of where we are now. But I'll stick around here to answer any questions relevant to this post or Eve in general.

Edit: I wasn't anticipating this would be on HN today, but it is, so here is part 2 with the rest of the story: http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2016/06/22/mar2/

zubairq3• 10 years ago

Will it be possible To upload aN existing spreadsheet with formulae from excel and then gradually Add eve specific functionality?

cmontella9• 10 years ago

Eve is only as useful as the data in it, so we really want to make it easy to import data from a variety of sources. You bring up a really good point though, that if our interface is grid-based, then there should be a simple mapping from Excel -> Eve. We support a superset of Excel functionality, so theoretically it should be possible, but as always the devil is in the details.

rocky1138• 10 years ago

What is Eve?

cmontella9• 10 years ago

Yeah, there is no context to this post, so I appreciate your confusion. Eve is a programming platform we are designing to bring the power of programming to non-programmers. You can read a little more about our mission here: http://witheve.com/

Incidental Complexity is our dev blog, which we've been using to update people about our work. We are developing in the open, so you can see what we're up to on our GitHub: https://github.com/witheve/lueve

tremblane• 10 years ago

At first I thought they were talking about the game, EVE Online. And then the example on the page reference "moons per planet", which confirmed to me they were talking about that space game.

azeirah• 10 years ago

It's not about that game though :p

cmontella9• 10 years ago

I think in the future, I will be using dinosaurs in my examples :P

jschwartzi2• 10 years ago

The fact that it seems to be about some kind of spreadsheet doesn't fundamentally affect the misunderstanding either.

lagadu• 10 years ago

Same here, particularly because the Eve Online devs are also known for posting interesting dev blogs[0][1]

[0] https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/behind-the-sc...

[1] https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/tranquility-t...

kovek• 10 years ago

This video shows some of the ideas and work that lead up to Eve:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8

danso• 10 years ago

I was a little confused with the two posts when read together...I get that the GUI isn't yet complete, so I don't think I'm meant to understand what the grid demo is showing or how it connects to the backend...but in the second section, a lot of attention is given to the REPL...is one of the foreseen use cases that users will be entering data via REPL?

cmontella9• 10 years ago

I wrote a little about this is a previous dev diary [1]. The short answer is we wanted to decouple our GUI from the programming platform. We had a syntax for the language at one point in 2014. But we also believed in dogfooding; if we are creating a programming language for non-programmers, we should be using it as they would i.e. without a syntax.

Unfortunately, this led to the situation where our platform couldn't progress past our GUI. This might have been okay, except we didn't know what the GUI should look like. We've tried grids, graphs, wikis, madlibs, and everything else. The GUI was kept in a constant state of flux, so our entire platform was.

So we wised up and made a protocol and a text syntax to interface with the Eve server. By loosely coupling the platform and the GUI, we can now progress them at different rates.

To be clear, we don't intend that the language will be exposed to non-programmers through the REPL. However we've always expected that developers will be our first users, and we want to have some tools they're familiar with. At the same time, we are still developing UI concepts for non-programmers, trying to hone in on what works.

[1] http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2016/06/10/jan-feb/

c-smile4• 10 years ago

So it is always to be a client/server thing, right? Cloudy? Is this a strict requirement? Like users to work cooperatively on the same document (a.k.a. Google Wave, sic transit gloria mundi).

_pmf_3• 10 years ago

The MS Access is strong with this one.

But actually, while it's completely useless on a PC, a usable graphical environment is clearly needed for the tablet market, so I don't understand why they are so insistent on pushing the 4GL / application builder approach from the early 90ies.

coldtea3• 10 years ago

The MS Access is strong with this one.

Actually not much about Access in that. Their stated goal, OTOH, is to make an Excel like tool.

But actually, while it's completely useless on a PC

Huh? If done right, it will be extremely useful on a PC, the same way Excel is, but as an avenue for far more programmability than Excel.

so I don't understand why they are so insistent on pushing the 4GL / application builder approach from the early 90ies.

Because that approach is also of the 21st century and onwards.

It's rather us, programmers, who insist on dragging the conventional approach (not to mention crude text-based tools like Emacs and Vim) against the times. Besides the 4GL/application builder space left unexplored, Lisp Machines and Smalltalk environment were more advanced than what we use today in a lot of ways.

_pmf_3• 10 years ago

Huh? If done right, it will be extremely useful on a PC, the same way Excel is, but as an avenue for far more programmability than Excel.

You cannot be more programmable than Excel, because VBA is deeply integrated and it already is fully programmable. The question is: how will Eve solve the GUI vs. scripting dichotomy that, in my opinion, is pervasive throughout all "innovative" programming environments.

Besides the 4GL/application builder space left unexplored, Lisp Machines and Smalltalk environment were more advanced than what we use today in a lot of ways.

I completely agree with this.

Eve Developer Diary, March — Part 1: UI

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