4 ms·

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

by 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
dragonwriter 9y ago
> These guys have delusions of grandeur. Their communication showed only the amount of that that is typical of every start up; it may be more irritating to many technical folk because, unlike most startups, programming was the problem domain and not just a tool used in the solution, making the hyperbole more obvious than normal. > I just hope Eve's failure is going to be a lesson in humility. Eve's failure does nothing to change the structural factors that drive hyperbolic public messaging in the startup world.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Yes! All my real world interactions with Chris Granger have been very positive, he doesn’t come off as arrogant at all. I admit that I and others were initially put off by the hyperbolic messaging, but I see the value in it now.

by d--b 9y ago

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

dragonwriter 9y ago

> These guys have delusions of grandeur. Their communication showed only the amount of that that is typical of every start up; it may be more irritating to many technical folk because, unlike most startups, programming was the problem domain and not just a tool used in the solution, making the hyperbole more obvious than normal. > I just hope Eve's failure is going to be a lesson in humility. Eve's failure does nothing to change the structural factors that drive hyperbolic public messaging in the startup world.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Yes! All my real world interactions with Chris Granger have been very positive, he doesn’t come off as arrogant at all. I admit that I and others were initially put off by the hyperbolic messaging, but I see the value in it now.