Eve: Programming designed for humans

by jhund • 8 years ago

158 120 8 years ago

In case you missed it, this project is no longer being actively developed: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/eve-talk/YFguOGkNrBo/E...

mcfunk• 8 years ago

Thanks for linking this. The community response is quite something.

"Even the short amount of time I wrote Eve taught me that programming doesn't need to be so complex.

If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have believed you could program without loops.

If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have thought twice about why all of the different layers of the stack communicated and passed data around in different ways.

If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have believed you could just programming the happy case, because the runtime would run only the blocks of code that work with your state.

Rest assured that rethinking and reimagining programming has a bigger movement now than when you started and you helped drive it.

Ruben" (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/eve-talk/YFguOGkNrBo/r_S9hNc...)

RubenSandwich3• 8 years ago

That's me.

I still think learning some Eve is worth your time just to see and experience something very different. You can get started here: http://play.witheve.com/#/examples/quickstart.eve. (This is Eve 0.2)

kbd• 8 years ago

If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have believed you could program without loops.

What's he referring to here?

weatherlight2• 8 years ago

If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have believed you could program without loops

recursion?

WaxProlix3• 8 years ago

I wonder what Chris Granger will almost-build next.

FPGAhacker2• 8 years ago

What a nice thing to say.

aarpmcgee• 8 years ago

This is no longer an active project... https://twitter.com/with_eve/status/956258695049981952 Odd that its not mentioned on their site though?

hacker_92• 8 years ago

Maybe they haven't accepted it yet. Though their blog posts were always few and far apart.

amelius• 8 years ago

Is this related to the eveonline game?

grzm2• 8 years ago

No.

Sohcahtoa824• 8 years ago

You could have clicked the link and found out for yourself in like 5 seconds.

grzm2• 8 years ago

Discussion from original release in 2016 (nearly 400 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12817468

weatherlight2• 8 years ago

it looks (superficially) a lot like Elm.

acobster• 8 years ago

It's more in the logical programming paradigm than the functional paradigm, IIRC.

smt882• 8 years ago

I'm a huge advocate of bringing usability/ergonomic considerations to programming languages. That said, I have strong opinions about syntax decisions that hinder those goals.

For example, writing out words instead of using symbols is easier to understand at first glance, but it's much harder to skim (even after becoming familiar with the language). SQL is a really hard language to skim. Of course, the opposite end of the spectrum (C is close) is also hard to skim.

seanmcdirmid3• 8 years ago

So is APL easy to skim?

munificent3• 8 years ago

You're being snarky, but I think there's something to the parent comment.

I like the idea that most of the words that someone sees in a program are words in the domain of the program itself — its nouns and verbs — and not words in the domain of the underlying implementation language.

For example, though I visually like the way Ruby's "begin" and "end" look for delimiters, I think braces are better in that they reduce the "word clutter" of the code.

You can probably take this too far. I wouldn't want to use punctuation for control flow. But perhaps that's an argument that, like Smalltalk, control flow should be an API and not built in syntax.

cmontella3• 8 years ago

There are tradeoffs. The syntax was explicitly designed to be eminently readable, because our target audience were groups who were not traditionally programmers, but who might still be highly technical. For this group of people, they may not take readily to C++, but are instead more comfortable with languages like Python and SQL. Perhaps skimming code suffers from this design, but we thought we could mitigate that by adding other avenues for navigating code, such as a table of contents. We also made some progress in automatically annotating blocks of code based on what they do, to make filtering, sorting, and searching code richer.

jdbernard8• 8 years ago

An IDE like Medium, not Vim

Sorry. You lost me here. If you don't understand why so many developers are so committed to Vim, then I don't believe you understand how actual developers (not beginners) interact with code well enough to replace it.

kybernetikos• 8 years ago

Having followed the project I don't think it's fair to assume that those working on it didn't understand why developers like vim. It's more just that traditional developers doing traditional developer things weren't the most important part of their target market.

A lot of thought and experiment went into what became eve.

jdbernard8• 8 years ago

Yeah, it's been a while since this effort has come up on my radar. Now that I'm remembering a little more, these are the same guys who were behind light-table, I think. So I guess it's fair to say that they've thought deeply about the problem. I still think that the path they are exploring will not bear fruit as in my opinion they seem to have a core, almost axiomatic disbelief in the inherent difficulty of software development and a corresponding disdain for the patterns of work that have led to what is actually productive today. I think that software development is fundamentally, irreducibly hard. Poor tooling can certainly makes it more inaccessible and good tooling can certainly make it more accessible, but the real difficultly is conceptual and not due to the nature to any particular language or tooling. Therefore tooling and language alone cannot make it fundamentally easier.

I'm glad someone is exploring it. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this will yield promising results. But so far it seems like every time this kind of work come around again it continues to make big promises without concrete benefit. At best it provides a more gentle introduction for beginners, which is a good thing. But I have yet to see anything that would provide to me as a professional even half the utility and "accessibility" of my current toolset. Typically many of the simplifications they make in the name of accessibility become more of a hindrance than a help as you advance past the beginning stages.

abritinthebay4• 8 years ago

Having been a programmer for 20 years I have no idea why so many developers are so committed to Vim (other than it is available almost everywhere, which is helpful when doing things on a remote server).

I'm probably going to get down-voted to hell for this opinion here but it's literally the least productive, least intuitive, and most frustrating editor I've used.

But "learning curve" it's advocates cry! The time I have to spend getting up to speed with vim is better used actually programming, not to mention the people I know who are advanced users don't appear to code any faster than I do. A couple of occasionally used text operations are faster perhaps (though in modern editors it's debatable) but it appears to not have much cumulative effect.

As far as I can tell the only reason developers use vim is because developers use vim. It's a tautological tool.

pasabagi2• 8 years ago

I think you're missing out a little here. Sure, vim doesn't make you more productive. Sure, time spent learning vim is probably better spent programming.

However, vim is just great fun. That's why people obsess over it, fundamentally. It makes tricky and repetitive transformations of text intuitive and enjoyable.

jefe782• 8 years ago

Take your well earned upvote! I've had many a person say the same thing to me about Vim and despite the fact that I like it, I can't see myself being as productive as I am in a normal IDE.

Genuinely curious if someone can explain how they're more productive in Vim than say Sublime? Take for example syntax highlight. If these things are feasible and easier, I'd really like to know.

jdbernard8• 8 years ago

Are you actually interested in having a conversation about why developers (like me) use vim? I've also been a programmer for almost 20 years. For me Vim+unix has outperformed VisualStudio (6-through current), Eclipse (and multiple derivatives), NetBeans, Xcode, and lots of smaller, language-specific IDEs.

jackhack2• 8 years ago

No downvote from me. I agree with your sentiment.

I suffered through learning "Brief" back in the 80s, and vim. The only feature I miss in modern editors is copying columns (usually from a bitmapping enum table). Not even drunken nostalgia is enough to make me want those control-this-that-or-the-other combos back. It's not worth the pain. It's impressive for me to see someone dance around the screen in vim, in the same way I watch somebody play a pipe organ with lots of ranks -- pulling this lever and stamping on that pedal and pushing this key and such while beautiful music pours out. Always impressive, but at what cost?

Besides, I like being able to see my code as it's executing, stop it, edit in place, back up, change execution points, etc. Maybe the visual editors have made me soft, but I can get far more done these days then back in the 80s anyway.

heavenlyblue• 8 years ago

Actual developers interact with live systems (see strace), which is exactly what medium is to vim.

ibdknox4• 8 years ago

For what it's worth, I have used Vim since ~2004. When I built Light Table, one of the first things I did was put a Vim mode into it. I understand pretty well why at least I use Vim. I also believe that these days there's relatively little payoff given the cost of investment. Rarely is the speed of text-editing the bottleneck in building something real. Moreover, there are far more powerful ways to interact with code than at the text buffer level.

jdbernard8• 8 years ago

Moreover, there are far more powerful ways to interact with code than at the text buffer level.

This is actually one of my core reasons for using Vim. I agree, but all of those "more powerful ways to interact with code" happen in my head, not in an IDE. And my head is far more flexible than the IDE. In pretty much every IDE I've used you start thinking according to the patterns of transformation that the IDE supports, which can be helpful for a beginner, but is ultimately very limiting. New languages start with no IDE support. This is mostly for practical reasons I concede, but it is usually also often the case that the new language is being written because it represents a new paradigm of thinking. It's not until the language matures and the common patterns of thought become known that they then become encoded as "helpers" in IDEs.

The other main objection to this, I think, is to point out that linear textual encoding of code is itself a bottleneck, and that a strict text editor like Vim will never let you move past that. Implicit in this assumption, however, is the belief that there is a better way to represent code than linear text. However, I would point out that throughout all of mankind's history, language (and text as it's persistent form) has been the highest form of communicated logical representation. We have had access to pictography and other forms of communication for millennia, but none has had the same ability to encode and transfer knowledge and logic like text. I think we are primarily adapted as humans to think in terms of language. My bet is that there isn't a more powerful abstraction than this given the structure of our brains. I'm happy to be proved wrong though.

Given both of the above, personally I find the most productive means of working is to work primarily at the conceptual/abstract level in my head, model the problem and solution in thought, then translate the solution into the most natural form for expressing thought: language (as text).

So most of the tools that the IDE gives me (especially regarding code transformation, etc.) are hard-coded, less powerful versions of the kind of mental processes I am already doing. I don't need those. What I do need is a way to encode my thoughts in text as quickly and efficiently as possible. I don't want to have to think about that at all. I want it to flow naturally from my mental model into prose (though not English prose, obviously). For that an IDE again gets in the way. It's slow and full of distractions. The Vim keybindings have become so ingrained that it's muscle-memory. And I've yet to find another paradigm that lets me manipulate text as effortlessly.

Bizarro2• 8 years ago

Developers are more committed to vi-keybindings than Vim.

Sohcahtoa824• 8 years ago

If you don't understand why so many developers are so committed to Vim

The only real reason I've heard people use vim instead of a GUI IDE is because it's simply what they're used to and don't want to change. (EDIT: And the fact that it's available on every system, but that only gives a reason to learn vim, not a reason to prefer it over an IDE)

In terms of features, there's not a damn thing vim can do that an IDE can't, while there are tons of things IDEs can do. It's excruciating to hear developers say "I use vim instead of an IDE because I can do X in vim" when every IDE made in the last 10 years can do X. And it does it out of the box without needing plugins!

I've literally heard people say they like vim because they can do some key combination to highlight several lines of text and then hit TAB to indent them all at once.

greptomania• 8 years ago

I avoid IDE's for three reasons:

1.) They abstract important (to me) details. For example, build system integration. I prefer to see the actual Makefile to ensure that things are being linked correctly. This is especially important on large HPC clusters where there are a plethora of compiler options.

2.) They are too graphical. Essentially all of my programming is done through the terminal, which is fast and lightweight as compared to, say, Visual Studio or XCode (or w/e the standard OS-X IDE is).

3.) They do too much to 'help' the user, which ultimately just gets in the way. This is obviously a highly personal and biased opinion on my part. However, it is important (to me) to physically type the source, rather than starting from some template with boilerplate and adapting it to my needs. This is perhaps a reflection of the poor design of many languages (e.g. Java, C++) which necessitate such quality of life 'improvements' for some. But, for me, I just want to code what I want to code without an IDE getting in the way ala the maligned Microsoft Paperclip.

While I personally prefer emacs to vim, I have no doubt that these points may be common to developers who prefer either to an IDE. To your point, I do not know (but would not be surprised) to learn that some fantastic modern IDE could do all of the above. But, why do all that when emacs works so darn well for me?

Sylos3• 8 years ago

Then you don't actually know Vim.

Vim is at the end of the day also just a text editor, so no, there's no things that it does that you cannot achieve in some way or another with any other text editor.

The point is how quickly you can achieve these things.

Vim requires a lot of learning before you can use it effectively, but if you do know it, you can do things with it quicker than you can with other text editors.

For example, to delete the last three words in a line, you can type into Vim's command mode "$ 3b D".

The $ moves your cursor to the end of the line, the 3 does three times whatever comes next, the b moves your cursor back a word, and the D deletes everything to the end of the line.

This is the kind of stuff you can do with it. And well, you can mix and match these to do lots of different things.

It is somewhat ridiculous, but for people who actually know these commands, they have every right to feel horribly slow in any text editor that doesn't work like this.

And aside from that, Vim is really extensible, so whatever feature an IDE might offer, you can probably get that in Vim, too.

marshray2• 8 years ago

there's not a damn thing vim can do that an IDE can't

# Edit text without having to constantly move hands off of the keyboard home row to move the mouse or hit keys like PgUp/PgDn.

# Change all the 'X's to 'Y's on the current line in 5 seconds.

# Syntax highlighting for [any language the IDE doesn't compile].

# Pipe text through an external program.

# Start quickly enough to pop open text files whenever you need it.

iamwil3• 8 years ago

One of the more interesting parts (to me) about Eve wasn't the interactive programming or the literate programming, but that it included a database inside of the programming language. Most programming languages think of a database as a thing separate to it (I think Smalltalk is an exception).

Hence, they needed language constructs to make it easier to talk to databases. As a result, Eve was inspired by the Bloom language being researched at Berkeley, which was in turn inspired by an old language called Datalog. In it, they take constraints of a declarative language (like SQL) and use it to make distributed computing a lot easier.

"Our main data-structure was now a tree of tables. Rather than one big top-level function, we switched to a pipeline of functions. Each function pulled data out of the global store using a datalog query, ran some computation and wrote data back. Having less nesting reduced the impact of lexical scope and cursor passing. Using datalog allowed normalising the data store, avoiding all the issues that came from hierarchical models.

At this point we realised we weren't building a functional language anymore. Most of the programs were just datalog queries on normalised tables with a little scalar computation in the middle. We were familiar with Bloom and realised that it fit our needs much better than the functional pidgin we had built so far - no lexical scoping, no data-structures, no explicit ordering. In late March we began work on a Bloom interpreter." http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2014/10/16/retrospective/

Here's a talk by Peter Alvaro (doing research with Bloom) about it, and I had to watch it 4 to 6 times to really get everything out of it. He makes a shout out to Eve at the end (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Aa4PivG0g).

The Bloom guys are the same guys that released the paper to Anna, the KV store just 11 days ago. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551072)

nickpsecurity• 8 years ago

Another example is combining a database with LISP via AllegroCache:

https://franz.com/products/allegrocache/

IBM took the idea further with AS/400 integrating one at OS-level for various apps to use that OS could manage for them.

scriptproof• 8 years ago

"Excited, we presented our prototype to a small number of non-programmers and sat back to watch the magic. To our horror, not a single one of them could figure out what the simple example program did or how it worked, nor could they produce any useful programs themselves." (From the article linked above).

As a programmer, I had the same reaction, actually.

iamwil3• 8 years ago

That was pretty early on. They iterated a couple of times thereafter.

tree_of_item• 8 years ago

That quote isn't in reference to the version described in the comment you're replying to.

munificent3• 8 years ago

Most programming languages think of a database as a thing separate to it (I think Smalltalk is an exception).

MUMPS [1] has a DB baked in. kdb+ [2] is a marriage of K and a DB.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kdb%2B

WaxProlix3• 8 years ago

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that MUMPS/M seems more analogous to a Database with a built-in language than a language with a built-in database, although having said that, the distinction seems pretty fine to me. Is Company X SQL, which can have sprocs and such, also a language with a database baked in?

As an aside: Does anyone (other than Epic Health Systems or whoever) use Mumps/M at any kind of scale? I hear that the issues with global namespacing can become really burdensome above even small thresholds.

ibdknox4• 8 years ago

I completely agree that the semantics are probably the most overall useful thing we presented in this version of Eve. Having the world just be views over a datastore that you don't have to manage in any meaningful way is hugely liberating coming from the way we program now. You don't have to worry so much about how things are "placed" - you can always access them wherever and however you want. Bloom gave us a nice way of thinking about how to deal with change in that context so that it's not just some giant pile of scary mutable state.

Removing the fetching and placing of data is probably the biggest source of Eve's efficiency too. It turns out a lot of the code we write is nothing more than plumbing things into the correct location.

iamwil3• 8 years ago

I completely agree that the semantics [of views over a datastore] are probably the most overall useful thing presented in this version of Eve.

Were you guys planning a next version of Eve with a different useful semantic? Or was this idea of having the world as views over a datastore the last overall useful idea that you guys ended up with?

oldmanhorton• 8 years ago

I believe a major programming environment that you are missing here is the SAP environment and the ABAP language, which (from my minimal experience) is entirely database-centric and probably powers most of the large enterprise HR and commerce systems in the world.

dopamean2• 8 years ago

I've been writing Elixir at work for the last 5 months and learned in that time that Elixir has DBs built in as well. ETS is a key value store and Mnesia (lol) is a bit more like a traditional db (I haven't actually used Mnesia yet). From what I understand these things are actually a part of OTP and so they ship with the whole environment.

moomin• 8 years ago

I seem to recall aphyr said he hadn’t bothered to Jensen mnesia because it was obviously so bad.

davidw• 8 years ago

I never had much to do with them, but stuff like dbase III and FoxPro and the like were integrated DB/language environments, and they were quite popular back in the day.

stareatgoats2• 8 years ago

Mmm... Ashton-Tate dBase III+, those were the good old days:) And later, similarly with db and programming integration: MS Access, and even Excel to some extent.

None of them ever made it past the 'desktop' as a whole though, probably a feature of any db-included programming language.

cmeiklejohn• 8 years ago

The Lasp programming system also has an eventually consistent key-value store built-in (and, we've scaled it to 1,024+ nodes).

Project home: https://lasp-lang.readme.io/docs

Results on scaling: https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.06423

SolarNet• 8 years ago

The whole thing actually reminds me of Inform7, which is a natural language implementation of text adventures on a similar (albeit very old) database query language system.

Zanni• 8 years ago

I just wrote a tiny parser game in Inform, and the language is fascinating. You can create complex, fully interactive scenes in just a few sentences. For example, with just "There is a billiards table in the Gazebo. On it is a trophy cup. A starter pistol is in the cup." Inform would create three objects (a billiards table, a trophy cup and a starter pistol) in a previously established room (the Gazebo), and would deduce that the billiards table is a supporter (you can put things on it) and the trophy cup is a container (you can put things in it). With no further code you can examine all three items, remove the pistol from the cup and put it on the table, and so on.

eggy• 8 years ago

Picolisp has an integrate database [1] which the author has been using to build applications for a living since the 80s or 90s (I cannot recall when).

  [1]  https://picolisp.com/wiki/?home

everdev• 8 years ago

I love this idea. I've always thought the disconnect between documentation and code felt a bit repetitive.

Why not write a Markdown doc that compiles to code? Especially with a system like Rails, where so much can be auto-generated. Obviously this isn't for mission-critical or new ideas, but for putting your CRUD app into the world, it makes total sense.

pcnix• 8 years ago

This particular part of it isn't a new idea though, it's literate programming, been around since Knuth.

cmontella3• 8 years ago

Literate Programming as put forth by Knuth always involved a "tangle" process in which source code and documentation is formatted into a literate document. This is due to the forced order of statements compilers impose on most programming languages.

What was different in Eve was that the entire language was unordered, and thus you don't need a tool-chain to read literate source -- the raw source itself is literate.

jackhack2• 8 years ago

That's what was promised by the UML (Universal Modeling Language). I remember consultants telling us in the 1990s how "soon, you'll just draft UML diagrams and that will execute directly."

Those consultants have moved on to selling some new fantasy. I'm still here writing code.

JasonFruit• 8 years ago

I was just reading about Light Table's denouement and how Eve was in a way its successor, and now I find Eve has gone about the same way. It looks like both projects foundered because the problems they addressed --- representing code in non-linear ways with changes live-propagating through the system's state --- are very, very hard, apparently harder than Chris et al. realized.

In retrospect, their harsh words about our current languages and tools representing a 1970s mindset come across as hubris.

dragonwriter2• 8 years ago

In retrospect, their harsh words about our current languages and tools representing a 1970s mindset come across as hubris.

Nah, I think the hubris is thinking you could make a business with a near-horizon payoff fixing the problem they accurately identified.

I can't think of any “build a new language” startups that have succeeded (I'm sure there's one out there somewhere, though.) Getting a language established is a long slog, unless you've got a mega-user as a partner from day one, which mostly happens when the project is developed internally by that mega-user.

currymj• 8 years ago

definitely not recently but I think MATLAB, Mathematica, S, Stata, and lots of other commercial scientific/numerical packages could qualify.

it may not be possible any more, though.

jbondeson• 8 years ago

As a KS backer of Light Table I always get sad about what might have been[1] if they hadn't gone the YC + VC route that basically lead to abandoning LT before it was near ready for daily use for most of us.

We never did get to see the vision that was presented in that KS...

[1] 2012 was two years before Brackets/Atom and three before VSCode.

cmontella3• 8 years ago

We never did get to see the vision that was presented in that KS...

When we produced this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWAMr72VaaU) for the v0.2 release, we actually went though the LT kickstarter video and tried to deliver on the promises made there. I think at one point in the office we had them going side by side, showing the promise in LT and the reality in Eve.

uryga2• 8 years ago

IIRC Eve was developed by a startup, and they stopped development because they couldn't find a business model to fund it, not because of problems with the language.

(Hopefully the community will keep it alive, I enjoyed playing around with it and I think the programming model might be onto something)

dragonwriter2• 8 years ago

Eve was a great idea, I’d love to see a community take it up after the business behind it folded. (I think v0.2 was the last version with the whole stack that had been built to that point working; v0.3 had engine improvements but I don't think ever had the dev environment, and v0.4 was a complete rewrite in Rust that I don't think ever got to a releasable state, though there were some demos before they went mostly silent for a while and then closed up shop.)

ModernMech• 8 years ago

v0.4 was missing documentation and some other habitability improvements, but in its current state it was by far the most useful Eve. You can download it here if you want to try it out: https://github.com/witheve/eve-native

matte_black2• 8 years ago

I really don't understand projects like this. Why can't people just learn to code, in an actual programming language? To me this is like instead of teaching people to read and write you teach them to draw pictures and use emojis instead.

marshray2• 8 years ago

This is something you posted 15 hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16625687 > No Klik & Play?! It was the reason I can say I was building and distributing my own games back in 5th grade! > No Lego Mindstorms!? I was building Robots with six degrees of freedom in middle school!

I think you, in fact, do understand the value of human-oriented programming.

matte_black2• 8 years ago

I’m not sure if I’d generalize my own experiences to the general public. Even though I used simple drag and drop interfaces to create programs before, I was also tinkering with HTML and JavaScript, so they weren’t a gateway to real coding. My time spent with actual programming languages greatly accelerated my learning.

I’d argue that programming languages are already human oriented, it’s not like we’re putting together programs with assembly or binary code like some people imagine. And syntax and conventions improve all the time to make it easier.

If you want to be able to simply speak a program’s requirements and watch it happen, there’s already a solution for that: hire a coder.

GrinningFool• 8 years ago

The action-response mechanism reminds me of the Easel programming language:

http://www.eslsyndetic.com/Documentation/overview_of_respons...

It was a cool model, if a bit ahead of its time. Good to see the idea living on.

norswap• 8 years ago

I think it's very strange that it isn't actively developed anymore. It had some really gushing reviews. What's keeping people from taking over the implementation?

hacker_92• 8 years ago

Thoughts on why this project was dumped by investors:

I think the problem they really had from the beginning was they were pressuring themselves to innovate in an industry that is already decades old. You can't raise $2 mil and not feel the pressure to perform, and sadly this is not how innovation works. So instead they kept releasing prototypes that didn't really make sense or remotely scale:

- turning sql into graphs that made a 2 line statement take up the whole screen

- the database language that had no performance characteristics at all

- the bouncing ball demo that seems to only be made to create a bouncing ball, and yet doesn't add more understanding to the process anyway

- the imperative language written in 'english' (but of course only accepts the english words and specific grammar the software understands) and so on.

Not trying to be harsh, but this is probably a good thing. Once they take a break and move on to other things, a ton of ideas will no doubt come flooding in, just because they aren't under the same scrutiny and pressure anymore.

zubairq• 8 years ago

As one of the investors I think it is strong language when you say "dumped", and not really true in my opinion.

You have to remember that there are still many people who want to back this as a project. One of the big issues is that it is a really hard problem technically to solve with many "unknown" "unknowns".

And yes, I agree that many ideas will flood in because of this, and Chris Granger and Rob Attori and co have already influenced many other people and projects, they are in my opinion the thought leaders in this new programming space, and as a consequence have already influenced the entire industry with their ideas.

In any case, they influenced me, and if they influenced just one person, that is enough for me :)

canada_dry• 8 years ago

I had only just learned of Eve through this post, and watched a bunch of Chris' videos... I was blown away by him!

I've been in tech a long time and have known lots of extremely bright people. But, I've not met many who exhibit such a broad horizontal grasp of complex technical concepts combined with an elegant and concise way of expressing this knowledge (e.g. via Eve).

I'd surely bet on this guy again.

_bxg1• 8 years ago

The IDE has some interesting ideas but I'm not convinced that the language itself is actually particularly intuitive. I would love to see a JavaScript IDE (Atom extension?) with features like

- "Prose-style", where comments are a first-class citizen and code lives inside blocks. Seems like this would go a long way to encourage thorough commenting.

- The checkbox-style thing, where you can easily mix different pieces from different files on the screen at once. That was incredibly slick. The general idea of abstracting code constructs away from the literal files they live in is something that's been bouncing around in my head for a while.

- The state export was pretty cool, though it's not clear to me that could easily be implemented without controlling the language itself.

mamcx• 8 years ago

The thing where this fall apart is try to get away from imperative, predictable code.

That will NEVER (ie, to be on mainstream) work for large scale software OR attract non-experts.

Try to make a "virtue" a "callback-hell" with other names is a futile idea (apart some specific scenarios). If is hard to debug, is hard to have a mental model of it, period.

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The other parts of the idea sound well, but is not clear how the magic is made or how create the "data store".

Roboprog3• 8 years ago

One problem with literate programming: a large portion of the industry hates to document, and thinks that comments are EEEEVIL. Not me, but many.

I would love to see something like literate programming become more mainstream, though. Even little things like having to repeat parameter names in a block above a function/routine, rather than simply next to each parameter, seems like it’s harder than it ought to be.

Eve: Programming designed for humans

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