22 ms·

The Eve programming language project is winding down

211 points by mrry 9y ago

trynewideas 9y ago
Missing context: this is https://github.com/witheve/Eve https://github.com/witheve/Eve, not the game EVE Online or the Python REST framework.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- masukomi 9y ago
  also http://witheve.com/ http://witheve.com/ for more details on what it is. kinda sad :(
  - ModernMech 9y ago
    There's actually not much on the main page anymore. Try the blog for more context: http://incidentalcomplexity.com http://incidentalcomplexity.com
    - djsumdog 9y ago
      huh .. that makes me think of Squeak (a Smalltalk implementation)
      - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        That isn't anything like morphic/lively, if that's what you are thinking about.
- mmanfrin 9y ago
  I was very confused, as today there is/was a giant $1million-worth battle between some large Corps in Eve.
  - knome 9y ago
    I hope someone does a write up. While I do not play, I've enjoyed a few well written essays on various events in their game universe.
    - gexla 9y ago
      https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/9kn745/eve-online-million-dollar-battle https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/9kn745/eve-online-millio...
      - eindiran 9y ago
        That was a pretty anti-climactic outcome: "Million dollar battle deals out $3300 in damage"...
        WrtCdEvrydy 9y ago
        It's always the inverse. You'll see a small frigate brawl break out into a clusterfuck but once you see major announcements, everyone's gonna get blueballed.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pbiggar 9y ago
As someone making something in the same general space as Eve, very sad to see this happen. Thanks for taking a shot and proving that there are other ways of thinking about programming! Looking forward to the writeup.
- chubot 9y ago
  Just curious what's the general space that Eve is in? Programming environments for non-programmers? I applaud the ambitious efforts of both Eve and Light Table -- it's definitely worth trying, and the negative result is valuable too. But part of me wonders if they were tackling too big a problem, or at least MARKETING a (potential) solution to too big a problem. IIRC, I believe they figured out through talking to users (which they did, which is good!) that most people want to do stuff with data. For example, teachers might want to do some simple analysis of homework assignments and students. And there are many tasks that fall into the category of what you would do with "mail merge" in Word or a macro added to an existing spreadsheet. I wonder if they would have had more success by nailing a narrow use case and expanding outward. The marketing always felt too "general". I feel like a lot of non-programmers want to get their jobs done more than they want to learn programming. You probably have to trick them into programming. Even 10 or 20 hours of up front "learning" is too much. FWIW, I've worked with technical artists in games (e.g. writing MEL scripts in Maya), and statisticians doing big data (e.g. writing R), so I have thought a lot about non-programmers programming. And I've also looked at and modified their code. There is probably a more polite way to ask this, but I think it has to be asked. How many people in the world have the IQ to write a program of say 100 lines that does something useful? If you have a job as a technical artist, a statistician, or an actuary, I think you fall in that category. (On the other hand, it's also true that not everyone with those jobs can write a program that works, let alone that can be maintained by their coworkers.) But there are plenty of people who can barely use computers. I remember that my former boss (a very empathetic man) was recruited by a neighbor to teach his son programming. The son played a lot of games, and was interested in making games. And my boss's realization was: "this person needs to learn how to use a keyboard and mouse first". I think with the rise of phones and tablets, you might see basic skills like text editing going down the drain. Contrary opinion: if you don't have the patience to learn how to use a text editor to say write HTML files, you don't have the patience to learn programming OF ANY KIND, even visual programming. (Incidentally, there is a similar inspiration behind Raspberry Pi -- basic skills like knowing how hardware works had gone downhill for Cambridge students since the 80's.) Anyway, this was a random bunch of thoughts, from someone also working on a programming language. But I'm working on a language for experts, not for beginners. (It's better Unix shell, which both developers and non-developer professionals -- like sys admins, data scientists, technical artists -- use.) The point is that I'm wondering what space Eve was really in. When I look at their website, I see A moonshot to make programming accessible to everyone. http://witheve.com/ http://witheve.com/ That doesn't tell me very much. If it's for everybody, then it's for nobody. I've always liked these observations from Paul Graham, which I've quoted here before: You can't look a big problem too directly in the eye. You have to approach it somewhat obliquely... http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html Let me conclude with some tactical advice. If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it. Don't say, for example, that you're going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be asking "are we there yet?" and you'll have an army of haters waiting to see you fail. Just say you're building todo-list software. That sounds harmless. http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html So basically I think it would have been better to just tell everyone "we're making a better mail merge" or "we're making better excel macros", or even just a better SPREADSHEET, which is itself huge enormous problem, but actually smaller than "programming for beginners". Then you'd be helping them get their jobs done without all the programming mumbo jumbo. But the whole time you could be trying to generalize it into a way of programming in other domains, for programming "in general". Just like Python can be applied to many domains. ----- Also, even if you SUCCEED at making a better language/IDE that subsumes what people do with mail merge, excel macros, and every spreadsheet in the world, you HAVE NOT succeeded at overhauling programming! Programming is a very big field now! There are / will be languages for distributed computing with various consistency guarantees, languages for computing with privacy, with security, languages for quantum computing, languages for machine learning. Those will not be touched by something like Eve or Light Table. That's one of the reasons I'm interested in shell -- because in many contexts, it's the lowest common denominator that connects all these different domains.
thecity2 9y ago
That's a little sad. I used LightTable for a little while, and thought it was very cool. Was looking forward to Eve, but it was beginning to seem like vaporware, so I guess I can't say I'm surprised by this announcement.
scrumper 9y ago
Oh, sad. I always get very excited about the stuff Chris does, it’s right on the interesting corner of the leading edge. I hope whatever comes next is a combination of his ideas which finds fertile ground.
haskellandchill 9y ago
This is very sad. I’ve been looking for something like Eve to develop difficult user interfaces in and was hoping it would hit 1.0. Wonder if there is any framework trying to do similar things in the JavaScript ecosystem, or targeting that ecosystem with code generation.
- RubenSandwich 9y ago
  Precept is almost the same model: https://github.com/CoNarrative/precept https://github.com/CoNarrative/precept. Not quite JS, but ClojureScript, which is close.
  - lilactown 9y ago
    This is really awesome! Even better, it introduced me to Clara.
- machiaweliczny 9y ago
  User interfaces are super easy with MobX + React. There's also Hyperapp which looks interesting.
steelmanning 9y ago
This is the same man, Chris Granger, that did a Kickstarter for Light Table, a so-called "next generation IDE," with promotional materials touting as new and revolutionary features that had been standard in IntelliJ, Visual Studio, and even Eclipse for years: http://chrononsystems.com/blog/light-table-concept-vs-reality http://chrononsystems.com/blog/light-table-concept-vs-realit... Light Table was also ultimately abandoned before completion. Perhaps Granger should rein in his ambitions somewhat, or at least try to delegate more (assuming there are enough people to whom he can delegate)?
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  You are being a bit harsh. These were ambitious undertakings with high levels of risk going into them, which, I bet, were well known. I've struggled in this field for 10+ years now and there are lots of dark alley ways that end in walls. Then everyone constantly tells you this has already been done when, no, it really hasn't (at best, the technology is there but so piss poor designed that it isn't useful). If you reign in your ambition, well, isn't that why innovation in the programming experience field is so stagnant (basically stuck at the Smalltalk level) in the first place? We should be free from disdain to take risks, possibly lose, with a chance of hitting it big.
  - steelmanning 9y ago
    > You are being a bit harsh I know, and I rewrote my post several times before submitting it, trying to minimize the harshness. But the pattern with Granger is pretty obvious, isn't it? Grandiose ambitions, over-commitment, and a resulting failure to ship.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      There have been plenty of people out there with grand visions who tried and failed the first few times. Then either they give up and tone down their visions, or they keep trying and perhaps eventually succeed. LightTable and Eve are still very influential and inspiring even if they aren't successful. I am personally glad they existed, as they provide experience and lessons for future efforts.
ursus_bonum 9y ago
FlappyEve inspired my first "Tiny C Game", Flappy, now part of http://TinyC.games http://TinyC.games
amasad 9y ago
I've always admired Eve but thought it was a longshot. Had it worked it would've changed the future of computing. I'm also working on making programming easier but instead of taking a moonshot approach -- where you build the language, the IDE, and the tools -- we're making existing tools and languages easier to use. I hope Chris doesn't give up, there's a lot more to do.
- juancampa 9y ago
  For context, amasad is the founder of repl.it
fiatjaf 9y ago
Stupid idea. They had a nice platform for dealing with data, then they pivoted into another nice platform for dealing with data, then again. But in the end they wanted to create a visual programming language for non-tech people or something like that. That's too much ambition.
jonathanedwards 9y ago
We need to have a conversation about the possible paths to make programming more widely accessible. Chris saw the problem clearly and tried to fix it. Respect. I am most impressed with the number of iterations he was able to crank in the context of a startup. But ultimately a startup may not be the best place to start, because low-end programming is not a short-term growth play. We have to play the long game.
- steelmanning 9y ago
  Squeak and its offshoot Pharo have been trying this for years. In fact, MIT Scratch was originally based on Squeak.
  - steelmanning 9y ago
    Why was this downvoted? Squeak and Pharo are both pretty obviously prior art for Eve. For example, the bouncing balls demo someone linked to elsewhere in this thread looks very similar to Squeak + EToys, albeit with a dark theme. Squeak and Pharo could both use more developers, BTW: http://www.squeak.org http://www.squeak.org http://www.pharo.org http://www.pharo.org
- cmontella 9y ago
  > because low-end programming is not a short-term growth play. We have to play the long game. This is true, and one of the reasons we opted to look at the acquisition route rather than raising another round; with raising another round, a whole lot of expectations would be attached to that surrounding growth, while we were still operating heavily in a research capacity. Languages like Rust and Go that have nice corporate incubators are a great model, but these languages tend to serve their corporate benefactors in some direct way. It's hard to pitch a greenfield project like Eve, because there's no real great way to quantify the benefits of a language before it's been fully realized.
  - thinkpad20 9y ago
    > It's hard to pitch a greenfield project like Eve, because there's no real great way to quantify the benefits of a language before it's been fully realized. Plenty of languages have been developed without major corporate backing (especially in the beginning). Off the top of my head, elm, elixir, Haskell, ML, ruby, python, coffeescript, purescript, Idris, Agda, pony and I’m sure many others were developed at least initially by hobbyists and/or academics. I honestly don’t know a whole lot about Eve. Maybe it was too large in scope to be a side project or fully volunteer-driven. But, even if that’s the case, that’s one of the main things academia is for; perhaps Chris should go for a PhD instead of a startup. I’m sure there are plenty of schools which would give him ample time and resources to work on it for research.
ModernMech 9y ago
For anyone interested, here was Eve in its last incarnation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zenELksXotI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zenELksXotI
- drcode 9y ago
  I really want to like this, but it's really not much more impressive than this, once you take into account the fact that the author clearly memorized the exact demo steps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIZO1TKPlzY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIZO1TKPlzY
  - swsieber 9y ago
    I think it's 1000x more impressive - you get to see it in action live. How that scales up to more complex things though, I'm not sure...
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  I don't think there is a better possible illustration of losing focus than that. You start with the goal of making it easier for people to deal with real world problems through unobtrusive programming, citing Excel as on of your key inspirations, build a unified browser and server side runtime on the basis of applying (and, if I understand some of the dev blogs correctly, perhaps significantly advancing from) cutting edge research in the space of implementation of rules engines / production systems / databases, you design and implement a simple, expressive, beginner-friendly language around the semantics of runtime, and your demo of how all of that comes together is...using an IDE property editor style interface to manipulate bouncing balls?
RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
While Eve is an interesting problem, the main issues that makes programming hard are the same thing that makes law hard: 1) Specifying something in an unambiguous way. 2) Knowing what assumptions you are making. 3) Anticipating contingencies. Read a contract or the tax code. Even though they are using English (in the US), it requires an advanced degree to be able to craft such legal documents well. It is the same thing in software. No matter how easy and intuitive you make the language and environment, you will still run into those 3 issues, and it will require dedication, training (whether formal or informal), and time to make a great programmer.
- nightski 9y ago
  Agreed, it's hard and it takes a certain type of person to be effective at it. I'd go a step further and say that tools designed to make programming "easier" or for the masses not only are a wasted effort but actually detrimental (I'm not taking about learning environments such as MIT Squeak here, that is altogether different). We need better tools that let someone who masters programming to take their vision and realize it in production ready code as quickly as possible. This is a very different goal from "allowing a newbie to pick up a programming language in 15 minutes". I desire master tools. Tools that I know if I invest the time to learn (whether that takes months or years) will allow me to achieve unparalleled productivity as a programmer.
  - dman 9y ago
    I dont think we will get better tools until we as an industry get ready to pay for them.
- paulhodge 9y ago
  Yeah, people talk about necessary complexity vs unnecessary complexity. "Unnecessary complexity" is all those arcane coding rituals that we do, that our users don't know or care about, but we have to do because our current tools demand it. We can't get rid of necessary complexity and so we probably can't design a programming interface for someone that is completely illiterate in math & logic. But what we can do is 1) Eliminate unnecessary complexity, and 2) Provide helpful, structured, interactive, learnable tools, which help guide the author as they do all the "necessary" steps. If we just did that then that would be a huge improvement from the state of the art.
dustingetz 9y ago
Object Relational Impedance Mismatch Strikes Again
scroot 9y ago
None of us really know what programming is, and we don't have institutions at present that will allow people to explore the problem thoroughly. These guys deserved a better culture to work in.
- rntz 9y ago
  > we don't have institutions at present that will allow people to explore the problem thoroughly What about academia? Academia is not a great environment for creating tools that people will actually use, which Eve was definitely trying to be; but "exploring a problem thoroughly" is exactly what academia is for.
  - Uehreka 9y ago
    Bret Victor has been writing a lot recently about why the current academia can only churn out incremental improvements and not “fundamental research”. The problem with both startups and academia is the need to meet constant short term goals. Startups have limited runway and often investors who want to see a return. In academia, most funding comes from small National Science Foundation grants which are usually only enough to cover a fistful of months of research and require publishing a paper with novel findings. Many of the big breakthroughs of the mid-to-late 20th century came from long term fundamental research that was financed either through large public spending (ARPA, NASA) or large monolithic corporations who thought “meh, this’ll probably benefit us in the long term and we’re pretty flush with cash” (Xerox PARC and Bell Labs). Unless we can find ways to fund long term research (which btw will be high-risk, you have to be OK with getting no return for years or possibly ever) we will not be able to tackle large fundamental problems.
  - scroot 9y ago
    I agree in principle, but the academy is not what it was in the 50s, 60s, and 70s when most computing breakthroughs took place. The whole funding model has changed. Short term thinking is the way of the world now.
anateus 9y ago
Feels like the proper place for this sort of project is HARC. Given they're both YC, I expect that option was explored.
- ibdknox 9y ago
  HARC no longer exists unfortunately.
  - Pulcinella 9y ago
    I thought it was still on going? It’s still listed on YCR.
    - iamwil 9y ago
      I'm also surprised at this. Did they all move over to dynamicland?
      - robertkrahn01 9y ago
        They all moved over to find the next adventure.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      Bret Victor's group is still going (they got their own funding); I believe John Maloney (of Morphic/Etoys fame) is also still going with his own funding. The rest of us are all gone...
yinso 9y ago
Programming languages for non-programmers needs to be embedded in a vessel. Excel is probably the quintessential vessel. When people are trying to solve a need they have, they will invest the effort to figure out the tools, including learning enough programming to solve their problems.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  The Eve team emphatically, from day one, had this stance. It is perhaps indicative of a key strategic error that the course of the public work on Eve did not involve as clear as picture of the target vessel as of the programming language, especially given the churning on the PL implementation that dominated the last phases of the public effort at Eve.
steveklabnik 9y ago
A sad day. Eve is/was really, really cool. I was looking forward to watching it grow. I wish PLT was a viable path for more programmers.
zubairq 9y ago
As an Angel investor on the Eve project even though I lost my investment, I think that Chris, Robert and the whole team deserve recognition as they changed the whole industry, and now everyone is following them. I am proud to have had the chance to be involved with them!
- adwn 9y ago
  > as they changed the whole industry Huh? What industry are you talking about? The software development industry? Their influence was not even a rounding error. The let's-rethink-programming-completely industry? No idea, but that's not really an industry.
  - zubairq 9y ago
    They influenced swift and a whole bunch of other interactive IDEs with the research they did. Don’t use iPhone or Android if you don’t want to use these new languages
    - adwn 9y ago
      > [...] if you don’t want to use these new languages I'm stumped – where is that suddenly coming from now? When did I say anything about not wanting to use Swift?
      - zubairq 9y ago
        Light table/eve was one of the influences for swift
        diggan 9y ago
        The only quote I can find about swift and Light Table is this: > The Xcode Playgrounds feature and REPL were a personal passion of mine, to make programming more interactive and approachable. The Xcode and LLDB teams have done a phenomenal job turning crazy ideas into something truly great. Playgrounds were heavily influenced by Bret Victor's ideas, by Light Table and by many other interactive systems. From: http://nondot.org/sabre/ http://nondot.org/sabre/ And that just mentions "Playgrounds", which seems to be some sort of editor application written in Swift. It did not inspire Swift itself. And also, Swift hardly "changed the whole industry", as far as I know.
jgale 9y ago
I really admire the way that Chris and his team were open about their ideas and their journey. They inspired me and I'm sure many others through this. Thank you Eve.
_halgari 9y ago
Kind of saw this coming after the third reimplementation in yet another language. And why Rust? 2 years ago they decided to use Rust to implement a new language (IIRC Rust wasn’t even 1.0 at that time). That’s a huge amount of technical risk. I wanted to be exited about eve, but it was always too light on details, had too much risk to ever allow it to succeed, and after several pivots it failed. This story probably been a bit different if only it was a bit less ambitious, and a lot more pragmatic.
d--b 9y ago
I'm sorry to say but I am happy to see that this is coming to an end. These guys have delusions of grandeur. At best, they're good researchers looking into new and simpler programming paradigms. But the way they're talking about it is just horrific to me. It's full of "imagine a world where you could just..." and "we're building that world for you" BS. I just hope Eve's failure is going to be a lesson in humility.
- klibertp 9y ago
  The BS-heavy style of Chris' communication is indeed extremely off-putting, unfortunately, but it doesn't get any better if you ignore the style and go straight to the content. LightTable was an idea I rooted for, but almost every aspect of its execution was broken, and ultimately LT got dumped anyway as soon as it started getting bigger than a tech demo. They then started working on Eve, which was much more ambitious and much less precise idea, and tried to make it into a business at the same time, in typical startup timeline. There was no way it could have worked, I think. Meanwhile, the IDE and editors situation stays the same, stuck perpetually 20 years behind Smalltalk and Common Lisp environments of the '80s and early '90s.
- airstrike 9y ago
  That's standard startup speak, though. How else are you going to get investors and early adopters excited? Everyone is competing for everyone else's fleeting attention this day and age.
  - d--b 9y ago
    If they truly did find something amazing, then perhaps it would have been worth having investors and early adopters excited... I'm not saying they can't be emphatic, but I much prefer a simpler to-the-point style. ObservableHQ's is a good example (in a somewhat related field).
  - klibertp 9y ago
    > That's standard startup speak, though. That's exactly the problem: building a programming language doesn't fit - I think - into the startup framework unless you're prepared to be in stealth-mode for a decade. Even the biggest tech companies have problems with making their languages mainstream - for every success-story like Go or Swift we have some kind of Dart or Dylan that simply didn't work out, despite companies investing massive resources into them. > How else are you going to get investors and early adopters excited? With a programming language? It's easy: have a good, battle-tested codebase which implements your killer features efficiently and correctly, supports non-primary features just as well, and has a huge collection of written (open source) software/examples in that language. That's why I think PLs are not easy (or maybe even impossible) to make into a startup. LightTable had a much higher chance to work out, IMHO, because it was well-defined, was not without precedent and some other similar projects proved to be viable businesses (for a time). EDIT: I forgot, the Red[1] lang team tries to do something similar, ie. write a language and be a profitable company at the same time; we'll see if they manage, but then again, they are looking to "just" displace REBOL instead of "revolutionalizing the way you think about programming" (again). [1] http://www.red-lang.org http://www.red-lang.org
divs1210 9y ago
So... Will LightTable now get the love it deserves?
ilaksh 9y ago
They made some really cool tools. The tools did not end up being a financial success or mindblowingly popular like a mainstream programming language, but they were still relatively popular. In that a lot of people at least know what it is. Most projects, no one even knows they exist. Don't confuse popularity with merit in general, or not becoming massively popular with not being successful.
robertkrahn01 9y ago
I'm very sorry to see this. We need investment in programming language and environments – and right now there is pretty much zero of it. No, new programming concepts and tools will not pay of immediately but in the long term they can be incredible efficiency multipliers, empowering pros to do more work in less time and non-pros to be programming in the first place. As long as no one is interested in funding this kind of research & development we stay where we are today.
- lucozade 9y ago
  > and right now there is pretty much zero of it There's huge investment in programming languages and environments. It wouldn't surprise me if there's more than there has ever been at any one time. And it's entirely healthy that some fail. That's a primary means of learning. I would anticipate that some of the ideas from Eve will find their way into other environments, as did ideas from LightTable before it.
  - robertkrahn01 9y ago
    Where? The state of the art today of - debugging - code browsing, system exploration - customizable, modular, non-textual user interfaces* - immediate feedback after code changes - non-textual programming is < what Lisp and Smalltalk environments provided more than thirty years ago. * not necessarily visual programming. Look at the Genera Lisp OS or Plan 9 for example.
    - lucozade 9y ago
      Languages: Swift, Go, Rust, Julia, Haskell, JS, C++ etc etc Dev envs: VSCode, Electron, more build systems than you can shake a stick at, VMs, containers, playgrounds etc Non-textual programming. For general purpose programming, I can't think of any. There are some dead ends that will probably remain so. For niche programming, there are loads. And to my point, Lisp, Smalltalk and Plan 9 are all good examples of failed experiments that folk took ideas from and used in subsequent projects. Now, you may not like the investment and innovation. It may not be what you had in mind. Each to their own. But there's plenty of investment and no small amount of innovation.
akavel 9y ago
If you're interested in some other recent attempts at new approach to programming, I'd personally suggest having a look at: https://luna-lang.org https://luna-lang.org that had a first public (beta) release just this month. (I'm not associated, just personally have a strong belief that it is a breakthrough technology.)

211 points by mrry 9y ago

Missing context: this is https://github.com/witheve/Eve https://github.com/witheve/Eve, not the game EVE Online or the Python REST framework.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
masukomi 9y ago
also http://witheve.com/ http://witheve.com/ for more details on what it is. kinda sad :(
- ModernMech 9y ago
  There's actually not much on the main page anymore. Try the blog for more context: http://incidentalcomplexity.com http://incidentalcomplexity.com
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    huh .. that makes me think of Squeak (a Smalltalk implementation)
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      That isn't anything like morphic/lively, if that's what you are thinking about.
mmanfrin 9y ago
I was very confused, as today there is/was a giant $1million-worth battle between some large Corps in Eve.
- knome 9y ago
  I hope someone does a write up. While I do not play, I've enjoyed a few well written essays on various events in their game universe.
  - gexla 9y ago
    https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/9kn745/eve-online-million-dollar-battle https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/9kn745/eve-online-millio...
    - eindiran 9y ago
      That was a pretty anti-climactic outcome: "Million dollar battle deals out $3300 in damage"...
      - WrtCdEvrydy 9y ago
        It's always the inverse. You'll see a small frigate brawl break out into a clusterfuck but once you see major announcements, everyone's gonna get blueballed.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

pbiggar 9y ago

As someone making something in the same general space as Eve, very sad to see this happen. Thanks for taking a shot and proving that there are other ways of thinking about programming! Looking forward to the writeup.

chubot 9y ago
Just curious what's the general space that Eve is in? Programming environments for non-programmers? I applaud the ambitious efforts of both Eve and Light Table -- it's definitely worth trying, and the negative result is valuable too. But part of me wonders if they were tackling too big a problem, or at least MARKETING a (potential) solution to too big a problem. IIRC, I believe they figured out through talking to users (which they did, which is good!) that most people want to do stuff with data. For example, teachers might want to do some simple analysis of homework assignments and students. And there are many tasks that fall into the category of what you would do with "mail merge" in Word or a macro added to an existing spreadsheet. I wonder if they would have had more success by nailing a narrow use case and expanding outward. The marketing always felt too "general". I feel like a lot of non-programmers want to get their jobs done more than they want to learn programming. You probably have to trick them into programming. Even 10 or 20 hours of up front "learning" is too much. FWIW, I've worked with technical artists in games (e.g. writing MEL scripts in Maya), and statisticians doing big data (e.g. writing R), so I have thought a lot about non-programmers programming. And I've also looked at and modified their code. There is probably a more polite way to ask this, but I think it has to be asked. How many people in the world have the IQ to write a program of say 100 lines that does something useful? If you have a job as a technical artist, a statistician, or an actuary, I think you fall in that category. (On the other hand, it's also true that not everyone with those jobs can write a program that works, let alone that can be maintained by their coworkers.) But there are plenty of people who can barely use computers. I remember that my former boss (a very empathetic man) was recruited by a neighbor to teach his son programming. The son played a lot of games, and was interested in making games. And my boss's realization was: "this person needs to learn how to use a keyboard and mouse first". I think with the rise of phones and tablets, you might see basic skills like text editing going down the drain. Contrary opinion: if you don't have the patience to learn how to use a text editor to say write HTML files, you don't have the patience to learn programming OF ANY KIND, even visual programming. (Incidentally, there is a similar inspiration behind Raspberry Pi -- basic skills like knowing how hardware works had gone downhill for Cambridge students since the 80's.) Anyway, this was a random bunch of thoughts, from someone also working on a programming language. But I'm working on a language for experts, not for beginners. (It's better Unix shell, which both developers and non-developer professionals -- like sys admins, data scientists, technical artists -- use.) The point is that I'm wondering what space Eve was really in. When I look at their website, I see A moonshot to make programming accessible to everyone. http://witheve.com/ http://witheve.com/ That doesn't tell me very much. If it's for everybody, then it's for nobody. I've always liked these observations from Paul Graham, which I've quoted here before: You can't look a big problem too directly in the eye. You have to approach it somewhat obliquely... http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html Let me conclude with some tactical advice. If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it. Don't say, for example, that you're going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be asking "are we there yet?" and you'll have an army of haters waiting to see you fail. Just say you're building todo-list software. That sounds harmless. http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html So basically I think it would have been better to just tell everyone "we're making a better mail merge" or "we're making better excel macros", or even just a better SPREADSHEET, which is itself huge enormous problem, but actually smaller than "programming for beginners". Then you'd be helping them get their jobs done without all the programming mumbo jumbo. But the whole time you could be trying to generalize it into a way of programming in other domains, for programming "in general". Just like Python can be applied to many domains. ----- Also, even if you SUCCEED at making a better language/IDE that subsumes what people do with mail merge, excel macros, and every spreadsheet in the world, you HAVE NOT succeeded at overhauling programming! Programming is a very big field now! There are / will be languages for distributed computing with various consistency guarantees, languages for computing with privacy, with security, languages for quantum computing, languages for machine learning. Those will not be touched by something like Eve or Light Table. That's one of the reasons I'm interested in shell -- because in many contexts, it's the lowest common denominator that connects all these different domains.

thecity2 9y ago

That's a little sad. I used LightTable for a little while, and thought it was very cool. Was looking forward to Eve, but it was beginning to seem like vaporware, so I guess I can't say I'm surprised by this announcement.

scrumper 9y ago

Oh, sad. I always get very excited about the stuff Chris does, it’s right on the interesting corner of the leading edge. I hope whatever comes next is a combination of his ideas which finds fertile ground.

haskellandchill 9y ago

This is very sad. I’ve been looking for something like Eve to develop difficult user interfaces in and was hoping it would hit 1.0. Wonder if there is any framework trying to do similar things in the JavaScript ecosystem, or targeting that ecosystem with code generation.

RubenSandwich 9y ago
Precept is almost the same model: https://github.com/CoNarrative/precept https://github.com/CoNarrative/precept. Not quite JS, but ClojureScript, which is close.
- lilactown 9y ago
  This is really awesome! Even better, it introduced me to Clara.
machiaweliczny 9y ago
User interfaces are super easy with MobX + React. There's also Hyperapp which looks interesting.

steelmanning 9y ago

This is the same man, Chris Granger, that did a Kickstarter for Light Table, a so-called "next generation IDE," with promotional materials touting as new and revolutionary features that had been standard in IntelliJ, Visual Studio, and even Eclipse for years: http://chrononsystems.com/blog/light-table-concept-vs-reality http://chrononsystems.com/blog/light-table-concept-vs-realit... Light Table was also ultimately abandoned before completion. Perhaps Granger should rein in his ambitions somewhat, or at least try to delegate more (assuming there are enough people to whom he can delegate)?

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
You are being a bit harsh. These were ambitious undertakings with high levels of risk going into them, which, I bet, were well known. I've struggled in this field for 10+ years now and there are lots of dark alley ways that end in walls. Then everyone constantly tells you this has already been done when, no, it really hasn't (at best, the technology is there but so piss poor designed that it isn't useful). If you reign in your ambition, well, isn't that why innovation in the programming experience field is so stagnant (basically stuck at the Smalltalk level) in the first place? We should be free from disdain to take risks, possibly lose, with a chance of hitting it big.
- steelmanning 9y ago
  > You are being a bit harsh I know, and I rewrote my post several times before submitting it, trying to minimize the harshness. But the pattern with Granger is pretty obvious, isn't it? Grandiose ambitions, over-commitment, and a resulting failure to ship.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    There have been plenty of people out there with grand visions who tried and failed the first few times. Then either they give up and tone down their visions, or they keep trying and perhaps eventually succeed. LightTable and Eve are still very influential and inspiring even if they aren't successful. I am personally glad they existed, as they provide experience and lessons for future efforts.

ursus_bonum 9y ago

FlappyEve inspired my first "Tiny C Game", Flappy, now part of http://TinyC.games http://TinyC.games

amasad 9y ago

I've always admired Eve but thought it was a longshot. Had it worked it would've changed the future of computing. I'm also working on making programming easier but instead of taking a moonshot approach -- where you build the language, the IDE, and the tools -- we're making existing tools and languages easier to use. I hope Chris doesn't give up, there's a lot more to do.

juancampa 9y ago
For context, amasad is the founder of repl.it

fiatjaf 9y ago

Stupid idea. They had a nice platform for dealing with data, then they pivoted into another nice platform for dealing with data, then again. But in the end they wanted to create a visual programming language for non-tech people or something like that. That's too much ambition.

jonathanedwards 9y ago

We need to have a conversation about the possible paths to make programming more widely accessible. Chris saw the problem clearly and tried to fix it. Respect. I am most impressed with the number of iterations he was able to crank in the context of a startup. But ultimately a startup may not be the best place to start, because low-end programming is not a short-term growth play. We have to play the long game.

steelmanning 9y ago
Squeak and its offshoot Pharo have been trying this for years. In fact, MIT Scratch was originally based on Squeak.
- steelmanning 9y ago
  Why was this downvoted? Squeak and Pharo are both pretty obviously prior art for Eve. For example, the bouncing balls demo someone linked to elsewhere in this thread looks very similar to Squeak + EToys, albeit with a dark theme. Squeak and Pharo could both use more developers, BTW: http://www.squeak.org http://www.squeak.org http://www.pharo.org http://www.pharo.org
cmontella 9y ago
> because low-end programming is not a short-term growth play. We have to play the long game. This is true, and one of the reasons we opted to look at the acquisition route rather than raising another round; with raising another round, a whole lot of expectations would be attached to that surrounding growth, while we were still operating heavily in a research capacity. Languages like Rust and Go that have nice corporate incubators are a great model, but these languages tend to serve their corporate benefactors in some direct way. It's hard to pitch a greenfield project like Eve, because there's no real great way to quantify the benefits of a language before it's been fully realized.
- thinkpad20 9y ago
  > It's hard to pitch a greenfield project like Eve, because there's no real great way to quantify the benefits of a language before it's been fully realized. Plenty of languages have been developed without major corporate backing (especially in the beginning). Off the top of my head, elm, elixir, Haskell, ML, ruby, python, coffeescript, purescript, Idris, Agda, pony and I’m sure many others were developed at least initially by hobbyists and/or academics. I honestly don’t know a whole lot about Eve. Maybe it was too large in scope to be a side project or fully volunteer-driven. But, even if that’s the case, that’s one of the main things academia is for; perhaps Chris should go for a PhD instead of a startup. I’m sure there are plenty of schools which would give him ample time and resources to work on it for research.

ModernMech 9y ago

For anyone interested, here was Eve in its last incarnation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zenELksXotI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zenELksXotI

drcode 9y ago
I really want to like this, but it's really not much more impressive than this, once you take into account the fact that the author clearly memorized the exact demo steps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIZO1TKPlzY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIZO1TKPlzY
- swsieber 9y ago
  I think it's 1000x more impressive - you get to see it in action live. How that scales up to more complex things though, I'm not sure...
dragonwriter 9y ago
I don't think there is a better possible illustration of losing focus than that. You start with the goal of making it easier for people to deal with real world problems through unobtrusive programming, citing Excel as on of your key inspirations, build a unified browser and server side runtime on the basis of applying (and, if I understand some of the dev blogs correctly, perhaps significantly advancing from) cutting edge research in the space of implementation of rules engines / production systems / databases, you design and implement a simple, expressive, beginner-friendly language around the semantics of runtime, and your demo of how all of that comes together is...using an IDE property editor style interface to manipulate bouncing balls?

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

While Eve is an interesting problem, the main issues that makes programming hard are the same thing that makes law hard: 1) Specifying something in an unambiguous way. 2) Knowing what assumptions you are making. 3) Anticipating contingencies. Read a contract or the tax code. Even though they are using English (in the US), it requires an advanced degree to be able to craft such legal documents well. It is the same thing in software. No matter how easy and intuitive you make the language and environment, you will still run into those 3 issues, and it will require dedication, training (whether formal or informal), and time to make a great programmer.

nightski 9y ago
Agreed, it's hard and it takes a certain type of person to be effective at it. I'd go a step further and say that tools designed to make programming "easier" or for the masses not only are a wasted effort but actually detrimental (I'm not taking about learning environments such as MIT Squeak here, that is altogether different). We need better tools that let someone who masters programming to take their vision and realize it in production ready code as quickly as possible. This is a very different goal from "allowing a newbie to pick up a programming language in 15 minutes". I desire master tools. Tools that I know if I invest the time to learn (whether that takes months or years) will allow me to achieve unparalleled productivity as a programmer.
- dman 9y ago
  I dont think we will get better tools until we as an industry get ready to pay for them.
paulhodge 9y ago
Yeah, people talk about necessary complexity vs unnecessary complexity. "Unnecessary complexity" is all those arcane coding rituals that we do, that our users don't know or care about, but we have to do because our current tools demand it. We can't get rid of necessary complexity and so we probably can't design a programming interface for someone that is completely illiterate in math & logic. But what we can do is 1) Eliminate unnecessary complexity, and 2) Provide helpful, structured, interactive, learnable tools, which help guide the author as they do all the "necessary" steps. If we just did that then that would be a huge improvement from the state of the art.

dustingetz 9y ago

Object Relational Impedance Mismatch Strikes Again

scroot 9y ago

None of us really know what programming is, and we don't have institutions at present that will allow people to explore the problem thoroughly. These guys deserved a better culture to work in.

rntz 9y ago
> we don't have institutions at present that will allow people to explore the problem thoroughly What about academia? Academia is not a great environment for creating tools that people will actually use, which Eve was definitely trying to be; but "exploring a problem thoroughly" is exactly what academia is for.
- Uehreka 9y ago
  Bret Victor has been writing a lot recently about why the current academia can only churn out incremental improvements and not “fundamental research”. The problem with both startups and academia is the need to meet constant short term goals. Startups have limited runway and often investors who want to see a return. In academia, most funding comes from small National Science Foundation grants which are usually only enough to cover a fistful of months of research and require publishing a paper with novel findings. Many of the big breakthroughs of the mid-to-late 20th century came from long term fundamental research that was financed either through large public spending (ARPA, NASA) or large monolithic corporations who thought “meh, this’ll probably benefit us in the long term and we’re pretty flush with cash” (Xerox PARC and Bell Labs). Unless we can find ways to fund long term research (which btw will be high-risk, you have to be OK with getting no return for years or possibly ever) we will not be able to tackle large fundamental problems.
- scroot 9y ago
  I agree in principle, but the academy is not what it was in the 50s, 60s, and 70s when most computing breakthroughs took place. The whole funding model has changed. Short term thinking is the way of the world now.

anateus 9y ago

Feels like the proper place for this sort of project is HARC. Given they're both YC, I expect that option was explored.

ibdknox 9y ago
HARC no longer exists unfortunately.
- Pulcinella 9y ago
  I thought it was still on going? It’s still listed on YCR.
  - iamwil 9y ago
    I'm also surprised at this. Did they all move over to dynamicland?
    - robertkrahn01 9y ago
      They all moved over to find the next adventure.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Bret Victor's group is still going (they got their own funding); I believe John Maloney (of Morphic/Etoys fame) is also still going with his own funding. The rest of us are all gone...

yinso 9y ago

Programming languages for non-programmers needs to be embedded in a vessel. Excel is probably the quintessential vessel. When people are trying to solve a need they have, they will invest the effort to figure out the tools, including learning enough programming to solve their problems.

dragonwriter 9y ago
The Eve team emphatically, from day one, had this stance. It is perhaps indicative of a key strategic error that the course of the public work on Eve did not involve as clear as picture of the target vessel as of the programming language, especially given the churning on the PL implementation that dominated the last phases of the public effort at Eve.

steveklabnik 9y ago

A sad day. Eve is/was really, really cool. I was looking forward to watching it grow. I wish PLT was a viable path for more programmers.

zubairq 9y ago

As an Angel investor on the Eve project even though I lost my investment, I think that Chris, Robert and the whole team deserve recognition as they changed the whole industry, and now everyone is following them. I am proud to have had the chance to be involved with them!

adwn 9y ago
> as they changed the whole industry Huh? What industry are you talking about? The software development industry? Their influence was not even a rounding error. The let's-rethink-programming-completely industry? No idea, but that's not really an industry.
- zubairq 9y ago
  They influenced swift and a whole bunch of other interactive IDEs with the research they did. Don’t use iPhone or Android if you don’t want to use these new languages
  - adwn 9y ago
    > [...] if you don’t want to use these new languages I'm stumped – where is that suddenly coming from now? When did I say anything about not wanting to use Swift?
    - zubairq 9y ago
      Light table/eve was one of the influences for swift
      - diggan 9y ago
        The only quote I can find about swift and Light Table is this: > The Xcode Playgrounds feature and REPL were a personal passion of mine, to make programming more interactive and approachable. The Xcode and LLDB teams have done a phenomenal job turning crazy ideas into something truly great. Playgrounds were heavily influenced by Bret Victor's ideas, by Light Table and by many other interactive systems. From: http://nondot.org/sabre/ http://nondot.org/sabre/ And that just mentions "Playgrounds", which seems to be some sort of editor application written in Swift. It did not inspire Swift itself. And also, Swift hardly "changed the whole industry", as far as I know.

jgale 9y ago

I really admire the way that Chris and his team were open about their ideas and their journey. They inspired me and I'm sure many others through this. Thank you Eve.

_halgari 9y ago

Kind of saw this coming after the third reimplementation in yet another language. And why Rust? 2 years ago they decided to use Rust to implement a new language (IIRC Rust wasn’t even 1.0 at that time). That’s a huge amount of technical risk. I wanted to be exited about eve, but it was always too light on details, had too much risk to ever allow it to succeed, and after several pivots it failed. This story probably been a bit different if only it was a bit less ambitious, and a lot more pragmatic.

d--b 9y ago

I'm sorry to say but I am happy to see that this is coming to an end. These guys have delusions of grandeur. At best, they're good researchers looking into new and simpler programming paradigms. But the way they're talking about it is just horrific to me. It's full of "imagine a world where you could just..." and "we're building that world for you" BS. I just hope Eve's failure is going to be a lesson in humility.

klibertp 9y ago
The BS-heavy style of Chris' communication is indeed extremely off-putting, unfortunately, but it doesn't get any better if you ignore the style and go straight to the content. LightTable was an idea I rooted for, but almost every aspect of its execution was broken, and ultimately LT got dumped anyway as soon as it started getting bigger than a tech demo. They then started working on Eve, which was much more ambitious and much less precise idea, and tried to make it into a business at the same time, in typical startup timeline. There was no way it could have worked, I think. Meanwhile, the IDE and editors situation stays the same, stuck perpetually 20 years behind Smalltalk and Common Lisp environments of the '80s and early '90s.
airstrike 9y ago
That's standard startup speak, though. How else are you going to get investors and early adopters excited? Everyone is competing for everyone else's fleeting attention this day and age.
- d--b 9y ago
  If they truly did find something amazing, then perhaps it would have been worth having investors and early adopters excited... I'm not saying they can't be emphatic, but I much prefer a simpler to-the-point style. ObservableHQ's is a good example (in a somewhat related field).
- klibertp 9y ago
  > That's standard startup speak, though. That's exactly the problem: building a programming language doesn't fit - I think - into the startup framework unless you're prepared to be in stealth-mode for a decade. Even the biggest tech companies have problems with making their languages mainstream - for every success-story like Go or Swift we have some kind of Dart or Dylan that simply didn't work out, despite companies investing massive resources into them. > How else are you going to get investors and early adopters excited? With a programming language? It's easy: have a good, battle-tested codebase which implements your killer features efficiently and correctly, supports non-primary features just as well, and has a huge collection of written (open source) software/examples in that language. That's why I think PLs are not easy (or maybe even impossible) to make into a startup. LightTable had a much higher chance to work out, IMHO, because it was well-defined, was not without precedent and some other similar projects proved to be viable businesses (for a time). EDIT: I forgot, the Red[1] lang team tries to do something similar, ie. write a language and be a profitable company at the same time; we'll see if they manage, but then again, they are looking to "just" displace REBOL instead of "revolutionalizing the way you think about programming" (again). [1] http://www.red-lang.org http://www.red-lang.org

divs1210 9y ago

So... Will LightTable now get the love it deserves?

ilaksh 9y ago

They made some really cool tools. The tools did not end up being a financial success or mindblowingly popular like a mainstream programming language, but they were still relatively popular. In that a lot of people at least know what it is. Most projects, no one even knows they exist. Don't confuse popularity with merit in general, or not becoming massively popular with not being successful.

robertkrahn01 9y ago

I'm very sorry to see this. We need investment in programming language and environments – and right now there is pretty much zero of it. No, new programming concepts and tools will not pay of immediately but in the long term they can be incredible efficiency multipliers, empowering pros to do more work in less time and non-pros to be programming in the first place. As long as no one is interested in funding this kind of research & development we stay where we are today.

lucozade 9y ago
> and right now there is pretty much zero of it There's huge investment in programming languages and environments. It wouldn't surprise me if there's more than there has ever been at any one time. And it's entirely healthy that some fail. That's a primary means of learning. I would anticipate that some of the ideas from Eve will find their way into other environments, as did ideas from LightTable before it.
- robertkrahn01 9y ago
  Where? The state of the art today of - debugging - code browsing, system exploration - customizable, modular, non-textual user interfaces* - immediate feedback after code changes - non-textual programming is < what Lisp and Smalltalk environments provided more than thirty years ago. * not necessarily visual programming. Look at the Genera Lisp OS or Plan 9 for example.
  - lucozade 9y ago
    Languages: Swift, Go, Rust, Julia, Haskell, JS, C++ etc etc Dev envs: VSCode, Electron, more build systems than you can shake a stick at, VMs, containers, playgrounds etc Non-textual programming. For general purpose programming, I can't think of any. There are some dead ends that will probably remain so. For niche programming, there are loads. And to my point, Lisp, Smalltalk and Plan 9 are all good examples of failed experiments that folk took ideas from and used in subsequent projects. Now, you may not like the investment and innovation. It may not be what you had in mind. Each to their own. But there's plenty of investment and no small amount of innovation.

akavel 9y ago

If you're interested in some other recent attempts at new approach to programming, I'd personally suggest having a look at: https://luna-lang.org https://luna-lang.org that had a first public (beta) release just this month. (I'm not associated, just personally have a strong belief that it is a breakthrough technology.)