Eve Dev Diary (August 2016)

http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2016/08/31/august/

by doty • 10 years ago

38 18 10 years ago

Dobbs• 10 years ago

I was really confused when I saw this that the Eve Dev Blogs, https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/, were being posted on HN. For others this is a new programming language called Eve and is completely unrelated to the video game Eve.

cjslep• 10 years ago

Here I was hoping others were getting as excited about clone states (free to play) as I was.

ZenoArrow• 10 years ago

What's interesting to me is that the more Eve develops the more it seems to be returning to its LightTable roots. This isn't a bad thing, there's still plenty of life in the LightTable approach, but my impression of Eve before was that it was designed to be a tool that non-programmers would use. Based on this latest blog post, it appears that may be of less importance. I still hope Eve continues to develop in its current direction, I'd like to see how the immediate feedback and flexibility of Eve can continue to be refined.

skybrian• 10 years ago

I think they explained in a previous blog post that they wanted a programmer-friendly format to exist, but this is a side feature.

Still, I'm skeptical. It seems rather unlikely that implicitly taking a cartesian product of two lists of query results is beginner-friendly.

logicallee2• 10 years ago

A programming language that non-programmers can use is like a written language that illiterate people can read: it's an oxymoron. (The minute you can use it, you're a "programmer"; the minute you can read, you're "literate")

bthallplz• 10 years ago

The previous form of Eve wasn't quite a programming language at all. It was akin to databases in Excel.

ModernMech• 10 years ago

Not everyone who writes is necessarily a writer. In the same vein, not everyone who wants to tell a computer what to do wants to be a programmer.

mej103• 10 years ago

You can do the same style of programming using the ClojureScript libraries reagent/posh/re-frame/datascript. Why not just use those?

It isn't clear to me what Eve offers that those don't.

vorotato• 10 years ago

Well it does have an extremely weird syntax. Why follow convention when you can move in an arbitrary direction?

mintplant• 10 years ago

To me your comment reads like the infamous "why not use FTP and this hodgepodge of CLI tools" comment on the original Show HN for Dropbox. Eve is trying to bring everything together into a unified, standalone package, with the goal of being more accessible to non-specialist developers (think people who write Excel macros).

http://www.witheve.com/

mej103• 10 years ago

Hmm, I don't think the situations are even remotely comparable when you look at the actual projects.

With Eve, you still have to learn their home-grown programming language. That is non-trivial. If you didn't have to learn a completely new programming language along with its own non-standard terminology and idiosyncrasies then I would agree.

I am aware of what they are trying to do -- I've been following the team for the last 4 years. I liked their approach of starting from first principles, but at some point they lost the plot.

avindroth• 10 years ago

I tried to read the documentation, but I didn't quite get it.

What would I use Eve for?

sixbrx• 10 years ago

I was really hoping to see more happen in line with the interactive database querying tools and demos. Slicing and dicing data, some simple analytics, maybe a little about how to get the data in and out to/from other systems. Something to show that it's almost at a practically usable point - then I'd be on board.

That's the kind of thing I could use now for my projects, but I get the idea that it's not the focus, with this new effort on the programming language. I was really a bit shocked and disappointed to see Flappy Bird to tell the truth, I felt that the project has maybe lost its focus.

After some reflection, it makes some sense, because I guess it's showing how the database is used for state in the background, so it's showing the close integration that's possible. OK cool - now please back to the data exploration/querying/analytics focus!

Eve Dev Diary (August 2016)

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