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So after they didn't exactly revolutionize the IDE with Light Table, and pivoted to revolutionizing programming, they seem to have kind of come around to revolu

So after they didn't exactly revolutionize the IDE with Light Table, and pivoted to revolutionizing programming, they seem to have kind of come around to revolutionizing... groupware? Which at least seems more plausible, as it ought to be possible to make a better groupware application than Lotus Notes. I think the larger implication is: Programming tools are actually pretty good, and the larger process of programming is fairly solid, and while improvements are possible, they're probably going to be evolutionary improvements that build on what we have, rather than throwing everything away in favor of a brand-new approach.

dgreensp 11y ago
I get the opposite message, which is that programming tools and the process of programming are so bad, it's hard to get a computer to do a simple task for you without tearing your hair out, never mind building a UI. A better IDE (basically a better text editor) doesn't even scratch the surface.
- webjprgm 11y ago
  Yeah. They said for doing simple things rather than building complex systems the current tools are not very convenient. I find it really useful to use Ruby's built-in CSV library to process data for spreadsheets then visualize it with a graph in Numbers. I pull data from copy-paste tables, extract from Sqlite databases embedded in applications, etc. But for something like scanning Facebook friends as they suggested I'd have to first figure out the API or how to scrape the data. Once I figured that out it probably wouldn't be too hard to write a script for it. I could probably even put it in a crontab (LaunchAgent plist on a Mac). Anyway, I think there's a huge opportunity to empower more people who are inquisitive and maybe somewhat technical but are not programmers. Make it easy for these people to solve problems rather than trying to teach them to "program". The end goal in my mind is the StarTrek programming model where you discuss with the computer what you want to do to solve a problem. Those crew members are scientists and engineers but only a few of them are "programmers". (StarTrek is a useful yardstick because we seem to like copying technology out of it. E.g. StarTrek communicator which is the late 90s cell phone and StarTrek PADD which is the SmartPhone/tablet.)
  - andy_ppp 11y ago
    And you end up with Moriarty taking over the ship? ;-)
- mkozlows 11y ago
  The thing is, it's easy to say something is hard. Programming is definitely hard! The question is: Is it hard essentially, or is it hard accidentally? That is, can you remove unnecessary complexity from programming and suddenly it'll become easy? That was the proposition behind first LightTable, and then Eve as originally conceived. But neither of them really found a satisfying answer, a way to say "hey, for making your web app or whatever, if you throw away your existing stuff and use this tool/process, now it's super-easy." That implies heavily that a lot of the complexity and difficulty is essential. Not all of it -- things will get easier and better over time, as they have over the last ten years -- but enough so that blowing it all up and starting from scratch isn't likely to lead to wins.
  - skybrian 11y ago
    There's certainly a lot of accidental complexity that comes from lack of standardization. For example, think about how complicated character sets were to deal with before Unicode. Then compare the mess of different kinds of Unicode encodings to standardizing on UTF-8. Or take file formats before XML/JSON/Protobufs. Or, going further back, floating point before IEEE 754. I agree that blowing it all up is not a win, which is why accidental complexity goes away only gradually, and it's partially a process of hiding it rather than removing it, with lots of politics along the way.
  - ibdknox 11y ago
    > But neither of them really found a satisfying answer, a way to say "hey, for making your web app or whatever, if you throw away your existing stuff and use this tool/process, now it's super-easy." Actually, we think we did. We're just not choosing that as the primary focus of the workflow in Eve. Now with a better version of the editor and with a bit more work on the UI builder, I suspect we could rebuild the entire foursquare clone in under a week. If we had VCS so that multiple people could work together on it, it might only be a couple of days. This foundation for programming has lots of implications for building "real software" - it's actually based on research for making distributed systems much easier to build. [1] We'll see more of that as we go since we're bootstrapping bits and pieces. One of the first things that will transition over is the compiler, if that gives you any indication of the level of sophistication you can achieve with this programming model. [1]: http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/eurosys10-boom.pdf http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/eurosys10-boom.pdf
- jaredklewis 11y ago
  Perhaps, but my intuition is that the bottleneck between most people and programming isn't the tools. It's that programming requires the programmer to conceptualize the problem formally, and then to formally define what he/she wants the computer to do. We can come up with better and better formal languages and ways for editing these languages (and probably should), but I would guess even a visual formal language, will still pose many of the same difficulties for users that existing formal languages do.
fcanas 11y ago
1. Modern programming tools have a decades-long head start 2. Why denigrate group ware? While this may not succeed, I have little reason to believe future improvements will all be evolutionary (I know you hedged there, saying "probably"). A lot can be learned from shedding assumptions. If the result of the project is inspiration for building tools on top of traditional programming models, the originators may be disappointed, but I'd call that success in basic research.
mej10 11y ago
> they're probably going to be evolutionary improvements that build on what we have, rather than throwing everything away in favor of a brand-new approach. Probably, yes -- but working on a problem starting from the beginning is something more people should do. It is riskier, for sure. And I am glad their team is doing it.
jamesrcole 11y ago
> I think the larger implication is... I do not believe it is reasonable to draw that broad conclusion based on one example
exelius 11y ago
This seems like more of a competitor for something like WebMethods -- a simplified way of programming complex business logic. With most business logic code, the hard part is actually figuring out what the business wants the logic to be and communicating with business stakeholders; and those are tasks poorly suited to most developers. There is nothing technically difficult about these problems; and it's work that's really more suited to a business analyst anyway. While developers should obviously check their logic to make sure it's sound; gathering the requirements is 90% of the work in these situations. Anyway, that market seems a lot easier to compete in than the straight up dev tools market. Dev tools are so personalized, with every person/team/project/company having different needs and requirements that it seems like the only way to succeed would be with a niche product (which naturally limits the scale of your success).
d--b 11y ago
Oh, they're past the Revolution, they've moved on to the Genesis. Seriously, Eve ?! I think they should change their motto to "Humanity, reborn"

dgreensp 11y ago

I get the opposite message, which is that programming tools and the process of programming are so bad, it's hard to get a computer to do a simple task for you without tearing your hair out, never mind building a UI. A better IDE (basically a better text editor) doesn't even scratch the surface.

webjprgm 11y ago
Yeah. They said for doing simple things rather than building complex systems the current tools are not very convenient. I find it really useful to use Ruby's built-in CSV library to process data for spreadsheets then visualize it with a graph in Numbers. I pull data from copy-paste tables, extract from Sqlite databases embedded in applications, etc. But for something like scanning Facebook friends as they suggested I'd have to first figure out the API or how to scrape the data. Once I figured that out it probably wouldn't be too hard to write a script for it. I could probably even put it in a crontab (LaunchAgent plist on a Mac). Anyway, I think there's a huge opportunity to empower more people who are inquisitive and maybe somewhat technical but are not programmers. Make it easy for these people to solve problems rather than trying to teach them to "program". The end goal in my mind is the StarTrek programming model where you discuss with the computer what you want to do to solve a problem. Those crew members are scientists and engineers but only a few of them are "programmers". (StarTrek is a useful yardstick because we seem to like copying technology out of it. E.g. StarTrek communicator which is the late 90s cell phone and StarTrek PADD which is the SmartPhone/tablet.)
- andy_ppp 11y ago
  And you end up with Moriarty taking over the ship? ;-)
mkozlows 11y ago
The thing is, it's easy to say something is hard. Programming is definitely hard! The question is: Is it hard essentially, or is it hard accidentally? That is, can you remove unnecessary complexity from programming and suddenly it'll become easy? That was the proposition behind first LightTable, and then Eve as originally conceived. But neither of them really found a satisfying answer, a way to say "hey, for making your web app or whatever, if you throw away your existing stuff and use this tool/process, now it's super-easy." That implies heavily that a lot of the complexity and difficulty is essential. Not all of it -- things will get easier and better over time, as they have over the last ten years -- but enough so that blowing it all up and starting from scratch isn't likely to lead to wins.
- skybrian 11y ago
  There's certainly a lot of accidental complexity that comes from lack of standardization. For example, think about how complicated character sets were to deal with before Unicode. Then compare the mess of different kinds of Unicode encodings to standardizing on UTF-8. Or take file formats before XML/JSON/Protobufs. Or, going further back, floating point before IEEE 754. I agree that blowing it all up is not a win, which is why accidental complexity goes away only gradually, and it's partially a process of hiding it rather than removing it, with lots of politics along the way.
- ibdknox 11y ago
  > But neither of them really found a satisfying answer, a way to say "hey, for making your web app or whatever, if you throw away your existing stuff and use this tool/process, now it's super-easy." Actually, we think we did. We're just not choosing that as the primary focus of the workflow in Eve. Now with a better version of the editor and with a bit more work on the UI builder, I suspect we could rebuild the entire foursquare clone in under a week. If we had VCS so that multiple people could work together on it, it might only be a couple of days. This foundation for programming has lots of implications for building "real software" - it's actually based on research for making distributed systems much easier to build. [1] We'll see more of that as we go since we're bootstrapping bits and pieces. One of the first things that will transition over is the compiler, if that gives you any indication of the level of sophistication you can achieve with this programming model. [1]: http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/eurosys10-boom.pdf http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/eurosys10-boom.pdf
jaredklewis 11y ago
Perhaps, but my intuition is that the bottleneck between most people and programming isn't the tools. It's that programming requires the programmer to conceptualize the problem formally, and then to formally define what he/she wants the computer to do. We can come up with better and better formal languages and ways for editing these languages (and probably should), but I would guess even a visual formal language, will still pose many of the same difficulties for users that existing formal languages do.

fcanas 11y ago

1. Modern programming tools have a decades-long head start 2. Why denigrate group ware? While this may not succeed, I have little reason to believe future improvements will all be evolutionary (I know you hedged there, saying "probably"). A lot can be learned from shedding assumptions. If the result of the project is inspiration for building tools on top of traditional programming models, the originators may be disappointed, but I'd call that success in basic research.

mej10 11y ago

> they're probably going to be evolutionary improvements that build on what we have, rather than throwing everything away in favor of a brand-new approach. Probably, yes -- but working on a problem starting from the beginning is something more people should do. It is riskier, for sure. And I am glad their team is doing it.

jamesrcole 11y ago

> I think the larger implication is... I do not believe it is reasonable to draw that broad conclusion based on one example

exelius 11y ago

This seems like more of a competitor for something like WebMethods -- a simplified way of programming complex business logic. With most business logic code, the hard part is actually figuring out what the business wants the logic to be and communicating with business stakeholders; and those are tasks poorly suited to most developers. There is nothing technically difficult about these problems; and it's work that's really more suited to a business analyst anyway. While developers should obviously check their logic to make sure it's sound; gathering the requirements is 90% of the work in these situations. Anyway, that market seems a lot easier to compete in than the straight up dev tools market. Dev tools are so personalized, with every person/team/project/company having different needs and requirements that it seems like the only way to succeed would be with a niche product (which naturally limits the scale of your success).

d--b 11y ago

Oh, they're past the Revolution, they've moved on to the Genesis. Seriously, Eve ?! I think they should change their motto to "Humanity, reborn"