4 ms·

"An IDE like Medium, not Vim" What's wrong with Vim? I think they're trying to cater to "the non-programmer crowd" with this, but by trying so hard it's aliena

"An IDE like Medium, not Vim" What's wrong with Vim? I think they're trying to cater to "the non-programmer crowd" with this, but by trying so hard it's alienating real programmers. I love vim, and I hate Medium with passion. I'm sure there are a lot of other HN people who are not so much a fan of the types of people who just write meta posts, rant posts, listicle posts, self help posts, growth hacking posts on Medium and call themselves a "maker" without actually building anything meaningful. So, you've lost me there Eve. Anyway, that aside, looking more into how this tool really works, this is NOT something an everyday Joe will use like they speak English. This is an actual programming language. The language itself is no easier than python or ruby (actually subjectively speaking the syntax is less intuitive than python for example). Also I think they're imagining that Excel users will just eat this up, since it's kind of like how people run pseudo-programs on excel documents. But people used those because Excel was the most popular app that lets them work with numbers back then. Now there are many ways to achieve what Eve is trying to do, plus Excel. Why would any lay person jump on an obscure technology doesn't do anything significantly new? Overall I think there's a problem with assuming that this is for "humans" just because it's "literate programming". "Humans" don't want all this literate programming stuff exposed. They just want to push a button and take care of things. On the other hand, programmers (I guess we should call them "non-humans") don't need all this literate programming stuff. They are trained to understand how programming languages work. They may think this is neat at first, but very soon will start to think all these comments are getting in the way. I have personally never seen any programming related technology titled "... for humans" actually work for "humans". Perhaps because these tend to be built by extremely talented programmers who are too talented that they are out of touch with how their grandma uses computers, they probably think their creations are easy enough for "humans". Sorry if this sounded too negative. I am willing to discuss and correct my comments if I am wrong about anything.

greenshackle2 10y ago
That's what I was thinking. I'm a human, I like my Vim and C. The main limitation of a language like that is that, if you care about performance at all, you have to program for the machine first, not for humans. You're always writing for both to some extent. For me this is the main challenge of programming; writing code that executes efficiently and correctly, and that is legible to humans. I love Python and other high concept languages but if I want to code for performance I need to understand what the machine is doing. The tower of abstraction is so high with these languages, at the end of the day it's easier to go, eff it, I'll do it in C, than to try to understand exactly how this code will be executed down at the bottom of the tower.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  Yup, and even if you don't care much about performance, you still have higher level languages which are good enough. That's why I wonder where Eve fits in. Most people don't want to program. And this is NOT because they're stupid. It's because they have tons of other important things to worry about. Most people don't want to build their own TV set. They buy it because their expertise is in other things. Maybe they're a doctor. Maybe they're a fields medal winning mathematician. Heck, I'm a programmer and deal with all kinds of programming languages but don't want to know what's going on inside my TV set.
  - lfowles 10y ago
    I haven't looked in depth at Eve, but it sounds like it's a bridge for the people that _do_ want to program but don't want (or even need) to understand the underlying complexity. As a close to home example, I've had several game ideas I've wanted to program for a while. Simple things, I've had notebooks describing behaviors and what should happen when in the game for years. My day job is software development, but I haven't been able to grok a game engine enough to implement playable versions of these games. In other words, I don't want to build my own TV set but I do want the favorite channels menu on my TV set to behave slightly differently.... perhaps it has profiles for each family member. Conceptually simple but hard as hell to execute from scratch.
- wccrawford 10y ago
  I've seen a few of the "excel crowd" comments so far. Could you imagine the performance of this system if they really let a few of the "excel people" make their own charts and graphs like are in that video? It would destroy the system in short order, I'm guessing.
  - greenshackle2 10y ago
    It could be useable, I don't want to dismiss it entirely without even trying it, but honestly the website's text has really turned me off, so I probably won't.
- deleted 10y ago
aikah 10y ago
> What's wrong with Vim? Emacs is better ;) But the comparison is a bit disingenuous. Medium is a blogging platform, VIM is an extensible text editor.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  I think they were trying to emphasize that their strength in "readability", hence Medium. I watched the video, and immediately realized I would never want to program in that kind of environment. The "literate programming" would get in my way. It would be like having someone follow me all the time and translate my words in realtime right next to me whenever I speak something. (Actually it's more like me saying something in English AND having to translate after every sentence) It's super distracting because I can't focus on what I'm saying because I lose my train of thought.
  - cmontella 10y ago
    I would say its closer to the reason we include emoticons in text messages. Text alone loses something from the original intent, so we add emoticons as a way to bring some of that back. Plain code as well cannot express softer yet still crucial aspects of software design like "intent" or "audience" of the subsequent code.
- aldanor 10y ago
  Emacs vs Vim in an unrelated thread, obligatory on HN :) // I concur
erikpukinskis 10y ago
I think what they mean by "human" is non-professional. All programming tools are for humans. But they're also almost exclusively designed with the expectation that the user will be able to devote afternoons, weeks, months, years to learning the tool. That's a fair expectation if your target audience is programming professionals... If it's your job, you can amortize those learning costs over some months of paychecks. But that a) creates a high barrier to entry for people to get into the biz. And b) mostly locks out people who want to do just a little programming. I.e. the Excel crowd. The field Eve is in, so called "end-user programming" is still trying to advance beyond spreadsheets, which were the last big win for non-(professional programmers). Well, HTML was probably in there too. WordPress templates, etc. But spreadsheets were probably the last quantum leap in the field. We're overdue for another.
- erichocean 10y ago
  > But spreadsheets were probably the last quantum leap in the field. > We're overdue for another. I'm working on it, and do think I have a solution. Unlike Eve, for example, you can (and we do) create (almost said "write", but there's no textual code) an OS kernel in it. And it's nothing like the approach Eve is taking, which I consider to be nothing like why spreadsheets were (and are) successful. To me, Eve is nothing more than textual datalog programming + a high-level stdlib + a UI wrapper. The only area we agree is that logic programming is an underutilized paradigm, and in my visual programming environment, I do use it for business rules (where it absolutely excels).
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - erikpukinskis 10y ago
    I tend to agree that Eve isn't quite the right direction. The REPL is important, so that's good. And one-click deployment, one-click forking of development environment, those things are critically important. But from there... I agree the high-level stdlib is a problem. I think what we need is an easy-to-dip-your-toes-into environment that provides a path down into "real programming" and ideally down to metal. I think the big problem isn't exactly UI or language or high enough level APIs, it's the way the APIs are structured. The two big issues I see with most tools are: 1) tendency to layer opaque frameworks on top of opaque frameworks which makes debugging down into the system difficult, if not impossible. (i.e. React) In this sense I think it's interesting that Eve is trying to build on top of itself. Anywhere there's an opaque layer you are putting a massive learning curve for anyone who is grappling with the finer details of that API. 2) declarative interfaces. (i.e. Ember) These require the programmer to have detailed knowledge of the inner workings of the runtime. Feels like we need tools that are made of primitives that the consumers of the tools have a clear path to understanding. There is this idea that the user will never have to understand how the tool works, but my experience is that you always eventually do. You always need to understand the layer below you, so the task is to make those layers easy to dip into... not to try to insulate your users from the details. Eve seems to partly fail on both of these. What does your approach look like?

greenshackle2 10y ago

That's what I was thinking. I'm a human, I like my Vim and C. The main limitation of a language like that is that, if you care about performance at all, you have to program for the machine first, not for humans. You're always writing for both to some extent. For me this is the main challenge of programming; writing code that executes efficiently and correctly, and that is legible to humans. I love Python and other high concept languages but if I want to code for performance I need to understand what the machine is doing. The tower of abstraction is so high with these languages, at the end of the day it's easier to go, eff it, I'll do it in C, than to try to understand exactly how this code will be executed down at the bottom of the tower.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
Yup, and even if you don't care much about performance, you still have higher level languages which are good enough. That's why I wonder where Eve fits in. Most people don't want to program. And this is NOT because they're stupid. It's because they have tons of other important things to worry about. Most people don't want to build their own TV set. They buy it because their expertise is in other things. Maybe they're a doctor. Maybe they're a fields medal winning mathematician. Heck, I'm a programmer and deal with all kinds of programming languages but don't want to know what's going on inside my TV set.
- lfowles 10y ago
  I haven't looked in depth at Eve, but it sounds like it's a bridge for the people that _do_ want to program but don't want (or even need) to understand the underlying complexity. As a close to home example, I've had several game ideas I've wanted to program for a while. Simple things, I've had notebooks describing behaviors and what should happen when in the game for years. My day job is software development, but I haven't been able to grok a game engine enough to implement playable versions of these games. In other words, I don't want to build my own TV set but I do want the favorite channels menu on my TV set to behave slightly differently.... perhaps it has profiles for each family member. Conceptually simple but hard as hell to execute from scratch.
wccrawford 10y ago
I've seen a few of the "excel crowd" comments so far. Could you imagine the performance of this system if they really let a few of the "excel people" make their own charts and graphs like are in that video? It would destroy the system in short order, I'm guessing.
- greenshackle2 10y ago
  It could be useable, I don't want to dismiss it entirely without even trying it, but honestly the website's text has really turned me off, so I probably won't.
deleted 10y ago

aikah 10y ago

> What's wrong with Vim? Emacs is better ;) But the comparison is a bit disingenuous. Medium is a blogging platform, VIM is an extensible text editor.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
I think they were trying to emphasize that their strength in "readability", hence Medium. I watched the video, and immediately realized I would never want to program in that kind of environment. The "literate programming" would get in my way. It would be like having someone follow me all the time and translate my words in realtime right next to me whenever I speak something. (Actually it's more like me saying something in English AND having to translate after every sentence) It's super distracting because I can't focus on what I'm saying because I lose my train of thought.
- cmontella 10y ago
  I would say its closer to the reason we include emoticons in text messages. Text alone loses something from the original intent, so we add emoticons as a way to bring some of that back. Plain code as well cannot express softer yet still crucial aspects of software design like "intent" or "audience" of the subsequent code.
aldanor 10y ago
Emacs vs Vim in an unrelated thread, obligatory on HN :) // I concur

erikpukinskis 10y ago

I think what they mean by "human" is non-professional. All programming tools are for humans. But they're also almost exclusively designed with the expectation that the user will be able to devote afternoons, weeks, months, years to learning the tool. That's a fair expectation if your target audience is programming professionals... If it's your job, you can amortize those learning costs over some months of paychecks. But that a) creates a high barrier to entry for people to get into the biz. And b) mostly locks out people who want to do just a little programming. I.e. the Excel crowd. The field Eve is in, so called "end-user programming" is still trying to advance beyond spreadsheets, which were the last big win for non-(professional programmers). Well, HTML was probably in there too. WordPress templates, etc. But spreadsheets were probably the last quantum leap in the field. We're overdue for another.

erichocean 10y ago
> But spreadsheets were probably the last quantum leap in the field. > We're overdue for another. I'm working on it, and do think I have a solution. Unlike Eve, for example, you can (and we do) create (almost said "write", but there's no textual code) an OS kernel in it. And it's nothing like the approach Eve is taking, which I consider to be nothing like why spreadsheets were (and are) successful. To me, Eve is nothing more than textual datalog programming + a high-level stdlib + a UI wrapper. The only area we agree is that logic programming is an underutilized paradigm, and in my visual programming environment, I do use it for business rules (where it absolutely excels).
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  I tend to agree that Eve isn't quite the right direction. The REPL is important, so that's good. And one-click deployment, one-click forking of development environment, those things are critically important. But from there... I agree the high-level stdlib is a problem. I think what we need is an easy-to-dip-your-toes-into environment that provides a path down into "real programming" and ideally down to metal. I think the big problem isn't exactly UI or language or high enough level APIs, it's the way the APIs are structured. The two big issues I see with most tools are: 1) tendency to layer opaque frameworks on top of opaque frameworks which makes debugging down into the system difficult, if not impossible. (i.e. React) In this sense I think it's interesting that Eve is trying to build on top of itself. Anywhere there's an opaque layer you are putting a massive learning curve for anyone who is grappling with the finer details of that API. 2) declarative interfaces. (i.e. Ember) These require the programmer to have detailed knowledge of the inner workings of the runtime. Feels like we need tools that are made of primitives that the consumers of the tools have a clear path to understanding. There is this idea that the user will never have to understand how the tool works, but my experience is that you always eventually do. You always need to understand the layer below you, so the task is to make those layers easy to dip into... not to try to insulate your users from the details. Eve seems to partly fail on both of these. What does your approach look like?