11 ms·

Eve: Programming designed for humans

158 points by jhund 9y ago

jacobevelyn 9y ago
In case you missed it, this project is no longer being actively developed: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/eve-talk/YFguOGkNrBo/EozaCfheAQAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/eve-talk/YFguOGkNrBo/E...
- WaxProlix 9y ago
  I wonder what Chris Granger will almost-build next.
  - FPGAhacker 9y ago
    What a nice thing to say.
    - WaxProlix 9y ago
      I'm actually a fan of his, and mostly mean it tongue in cheek. I kickstarted Light Table with my last $50 after paying rent one month in college and, while somewhat disappointed in the outcome of that project, remain generally supportive of his dream big/fall short approach.
      - FPGAhacker 9y ago
        Sorry for my reaction then. So much is lost in text posts.
        canadaduane 9y ago
        I'm grateful for your reaction (and OP's response) because the clarification made a substantial difference in how I interpreted that.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mcfunk 9y ago
  Thanks for linking this. The community response is quite something. "Even the short amount of time I wrote Eve taught me that programming doesn't need to be so complex. If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have believed you could program without loops. If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have thought twice about why all of the different layers of the stack communicated and passed data around in different ways. If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have believed you could just programming the happy case, because the runtime would run only the blocks of code that work with your state. Rest assured that rethinking and reimagining programming has a bigger movement now than when you started and you helped drive it. Ruben" (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/eve-talk/YFguOGkNrBo/r_S9hNcVAwAJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/eve-talk/YFguOGkNrBo/r_S9hNc...)
  - RubenSandwich 9y ago
    That's me. I still think learning some Eve is worth your time just to see and experience something very different. You can get started here: http://play.witheve.com/#/examples/quickstart.eve http://play.witheve.com/#/examples/quickstart.eve. (This is Eve 0.2)
  - kbd 9y ago
    > If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have believed you could program without loops. What's he referring to here?
    - RubenSandwich 9y ago
      Eve doesn't have loops, because the basic unit isn't a variable but a set of variables. So a computation is applied to every element in a value. e.g. x = [1, 2, 3] x + 2 // x = [3, 4, 5] I have since learned that APL does something similar, expect their basic unit is an array.
  - weatherlight 9y ago
    > If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have believed you could program without loops recursion?
aarpmcgee 9y ago
This is no longer an active project... https://twitter.com/with_eve/status/956258695049981952 https://twitter.com/with_eve/status/956258695049981952 Odd that its not mentioned on their site though?
- hacker_9 9y ago
  Maybe they haven't accepted it yet. Though their blog posts were always few and far apart.
amelius 9y ago
Is this related to the eveonline game?
- grzm 9y ago
  No.
- Sohcahtoa82 9y ago
  You could have clicked the link and found out for yourself in like 5 seconds.
grzm 9y ago
Discussion from original release in 2016 (nearly 400 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12817468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12817468
weatherlight 9y ago
it looks (superficially) a lot like Elm.
- acobster 9y ago
  It's more in the logical programming paradigm than the functional paradigm, IIRC.
smt88 9y ago
I'm a huge advocate of bringing usability/ergonomic considerations to programming languages. That said, I have strong opinions about syntax decisions that hinder those goals. For example, writing out words instead of using symbols is easier to understand at first glance, but it's much harder to skim (even after becoming familiar with the language). SQL is a really hard language to skim. Of course, the opposite end of the spectrum (C is close) is also hard to skim.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  So is APL easy to skim?
  - munificent 9y ago
    You're being snarky, but I think there's something to the parent comment. I like the idea that most of the words that someone sees in a program are words in the domain of the program itself — its nouns and verbs — and not words in the domain of the underlying implementation language. For example, though I visually like the way Ruby's "begin" and "end" look for delimiters, I think braces are better in that they reduce the "word clutter" of the code. You can probably take this too far. I wouldn't want to use punctuation for control flow. But perhaps that's an argument that, like Smalltalk, control flow should be an API and not built in syntax.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      Syntax highlighting usually is used to set apart the language's keywords from the rest of the program. They become less like words and more like standard symbols.
      - smt88 9y ago
        I agree. I prefer to have both. It's hard to argue that either SQL or Brainfuck is more readable than, say, JavaScript (to an experienced eye), so a happy medium must exist.
      - 9y ago
jdbernard 9y ago
> An IDE like Medium, not Vim Sorry. You lost me here. If you don't understand why so many developers are so committed to Vim, then I don't believe you understand how actual developers (not beginners) interact with code well enough to replace it.
- kybernetikos 9y ago
  Having followed the project I don't think it's fair to assume that those working on it didn't understand why developers like vim. It's more just that traditional developers doing traditional developer things weren't the most important part of their target market. A lot of thought and experiment went into what became eve.
  - jdbernard 9y ago
    Yeah, it's been a while since this effort has come up on my radar. Now that I'm remembering a little more, these are the same guys who were behind light-table, I think. So I guess it's fair to say that they've thought deeply about the problem. I still think that the path they are exploring will not bear fruit as in my opinion they seem to have a core, almost axiomatic disbelief in the inherent difficulty of software development and a corresponding disdain for the patterns of work that have led to what is actually productive today. I think that software development is fundamentally, irreducibly hard. Poor tooling can certainly makes it more inaccessible and good tooling can certainly make it more accessible, but the real difficultly is conceptual and not due to the nature to any particular language or tooling. Therefore tooling and language alone cannot make it fundamentally easier. I'm glad someone is exploring it. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this will yield promising results. But so far it seems like every time this kind of work come around again it continues to make big promises without concrete benefit. At best it provides a more gentle introduction for beginners, which is a good thing. But I have yet to see anything that would provide to me as a professional even half the utility and "accessibility" of my current toolset. Typically many of the simplifications they make in the name of accessibility become more of a hindrance than a help as you advance past the beginning stages.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
iamwil 9y ago
One of the more interesting parts (to me) about Eve wasn't the interactive programming or the literate programming, but that it included a database inside of the programming language. Most programming languages think of a database as a thing separate to it (I think Smalltalk is an exception). Hence, they needed language constructs to make it easier to talk to databases. As a result, Eve was inspired by the Bloom language being researched at Berkeley, which was in turn inspired by an old language called Datalog. In it, they take constraints of a declarative language (like SQL) and use it to make distributed computing a lot easier. "Our main data-structure was now a tree of tables. Rather than one big top-level function, we switched to a pipeline of functions. Each function pulled data out of the global store using a datalog query, ran some computation and wrote data back. Having less nesting reduced the impact of lexical scope and cursor passing. Using datalog allowed normalising the data store, avoiding all the issues that came from hierarchical models. At this point we realised we weren't building a functional language anymore. Most of the programs were just datalog queries on normalised tables with a little scalar computation in the middle. We were familiar with Bloom and realised that it fit our needs much better than the functional pidgin we had built so far - no lexical scoping, no data-structures, no explicit ordering. In late March we began work on a Bloom interpreter." http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2014/10/16/retrospective/ http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2014/10/16/retrospective/ Here's a talk by Peter Alvaro (doing research with Bloom) about it, and I had to watch it 4 to 6 times to really get everything out of it. He makes a shout out to Eve at the end (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Aa4PivG0g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Aa4PivG0g). The Bloom guys are the same guys that released the paper to Anna, the KV store just 11 days ago. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551072)
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  Another example is combining a database with LISP via AllegroCache: https://franz.com/products/allegrocache/ https://franz.com/products/allegrocache/ IBM took the idea further with AS/400 integrating one at OS-level for various apps to use that OS could manage for them.
- scriptproof 9y ago
  "Excited, we presented our prototype to a small number of non-programmers and sat back to watch the magic. To our horror, not a single one of them could figure out what the simple example program did or how it worked, nor could they produce any useful programs themselves." (From the article linked above). As a programmer, I had the same reaction, actually.
JasonFruit 9y ago
I was just reading about Light Table's denouement and how Eve was in a way its successor, and now I find Eve has gone about the same way. It looks like both projects foundered because the problems they addressed --- representing code in non-linear ways with changes live-propagating through the system's state --- are very, very hard, apparently harder than Chris et al. realized. In retrospect, their harsh words about our current languages and tools representing a 1970s mindset come across as hubris.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > In retrospect, their harsh words about our current languages and tools representing a 1970s mindset come across as hubris. Nah, I think the hubris is thinking you could make a business with a near-horizon payoff fixing the problem they accurately identified. I can't think of any “build a new language” startups that have succeeded (I'm sure there's one out there somewhere, though.) Getting a language established is a long slog, unless you've got a mega-user as a partner from day one, which mostly happens when the project is developed internally by that mega-user.
  - currymj 9y ago
    definitely not recently but I think MATLAB, Mathematica, S, Stata, and lots of other commercial scientific/numerical packages could qualify. it may not be possible any more, though.
- jbondeson 9y ago
  As a KS backer of Light Table I always get sad about what might have been[1] if they hadn't gone the YC + VC route that basically lead to abandoning LT before it was near ready for daily use for most of us. We never did get to see the vision that was presented in that KS... [1] 2012 was two years before Brackets/Atom and three before VSCode.
  - 9y ago
everdev 9y ago
I love this idea. I've always thought the disconnect between documentation and code felt a bit repetitive. Why not write a Markdown doc that compiles to code? Especially with a system like Rails, where so much can be auto-generated. Obviously this isn't for mission-critical or new ideas, but for putting your CRUD app into the world, it makes total sense.
- pcnix 9y ago
  This particular part of it isn't a new idea though, it's literate programming, been around since Knuth.
  - cmontella 9y ago
    Literate Programming as put forth by Knuth always involved a "tangle" process in which source code and documentation is formatted into a literate document. This is due to the forced order of statements compilers impose on most programming languages. What was different in Eve was that the entire language was unordered, and thus you don't need a tool-chain to read literate source -- the raw source itself is literate.
    - zenhack 9y ago
      Yeah, I've seen a fair bit literate code that is awkwardly structured to satisfy ordering needed by the underlying language. It works better in languages that don't care about the order of declarations, of which there are many, but usually there's something at the top to the effect of "we need to start off with a pile of imports, because compiler." Haskell will recognize a .lhs extension and do comments by default, using > to prefix lines that are actual code (looks block-quote like). Frankly I am something of a skeptic of literate programming. In most of the literate source code I've read, the code is clearer than the prose anyway, and having every detail in comments just makes the whys and the high level design harder to find. My approach is to basically assume the reader is familiar with the language and the key libraries, document the whys, overall design, and the api contracts, and try to pick good variables and write clear code. This is not to say "inline comments are bad," but I find that usually when I find myself writing a lot of comments explaining the details it's because I'm writing a lot of confusing code.
dragonwriter 9y ago
Eve was a great idea, I’d love to see a community take it up after the business behind it folded. (I think v0.2 was the last version with the whole stack that had been built to that point working; v0.3 had engine improvements but I don't think ever had the dev environment, and v0.4 was a complete rewrite in Rust that I don't think ever got to a releasable state, though there were some demos before they went mostly silent for a while and then closed up shop.)
- ModernMech 9y ago
  v0.4 was missing documentation and some other habitability improvements, but in its current state it was by far the most useful Eve. You can download it here if you want to try it out: https://github.com/witheve/eve-native https://github.com/witheve/eve-native
matte_black 9y ago
I really don't understand projects like this. Why can't people just learn to code, in an actual programming language? To me this is like instead of teaching people to read and write you teach them to draw pictures and use emojis instead.
- marshray 9y ago
  This is something you posted 15 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16625687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16625687 > No Klik & Play?! It was the reason I can say I was building and distributing my own games back in 5th grade! > No Lego Mindstorms!? I was building Robots with six degrees of freedom in middle school! I think you, in fact, do understand the value of human-oriented programming.
  - matte_black 9y ago
    I’m not sure if I’d generalize my own experiences to the general public. Even though I used simple drag and drop interfaces to create programs before, I was also tinkering with HTML and JavaScript, so they weren’t a gateway to real coding. My time spent with actual programming languages greatly accelerated my learning. I’d argue that programming languages are already human oriented, it’s not like we’re putting together programs with assembly or binary code like some people imagine. And syntax and conventions improve all the time to make it easier. If you want to be able to simply speak a program’s requirements and watch it happen, there’s already a solution for that: hire a coder.
    - nkrisc 9y ago
      > If you want to be able to simply speak a program’s requirements and watch it happen, there’s already a solution for that: hire a coder. If everyone had this attitude we'd still be traveling between cities on foot. Based on their demo, it appears the purpose of the language was to push the "human centered" aspect of it even further, and not to settle for what's possible today.
GrinningFool 9y ago
The action-response mechanism reminds me of the Easel programming language: http://www.eslsyndetic.com/Documentation/overview_of_responses_and_their_uses.html http://www.eslsyndetic.com/Documentation/overview_of_respons... It was a cool model, if a bit ahead of its time. Good to see the idea living on.
norswap 9y ago
I think it's very strange that it isn't actively developed anymore. It had some really gushing reviews. What's keeping people from taking over the implementation?
hacker_9 9y ago
Thoughts on why this project was dumped by investors: I think the problem they really had from the beginning was they were pressuring themselves to innovate in an industry that is already decades old. You can't raise $2 mil and not feel the pressure to perform, and sadly this is not how innovation works. So instead they kept releasing prototypes that didn't really make sense or remotely scale: - turning sql into graphs that made a 2 line statement take up the whole screen - the database language that had no performance characteristics at all - the bouncing ball demo that seems to only be made to create a bouncing ball, and yet doesn't add more understanding to the process anyway - the imperative language written in 'english' (but of course only accepts the english words and specific grammar the software understands) and so on. Not trying to be harsh, but this is probably a good thing. Once they take a break and move on to other things, a ton of ideas will no doubt come flooding in, just because they aren't under the same scrutiny and pressure anymore.
- zubairq 9y ago
  As one of the investors I think it is strong language when you say "dumped", and not really true in my opinion. You have to remember that there are still many people who want to back this as a project. One of the big issues is that it is a really hard problem technically to solve with many "unknown" "unknowns". And yes, I agree that many ideas will flood in because of this, and Chris Granger and Rob Attori and co have already influenced many other people and projects, they are in my opinion the thought leaders in this new programming space, and as a consequence have already influenced the entire industry with their ideas. In any case, they influenced me, and if they influenced just one person, that is enough for me :)
  - canada_dry 9y ago
    I had only just learned of Eve through this post, and watched a bunch of Chris' videos... I was blown away by him! I've been in tech a long time and have known lots of extremely bright people. But, I've not met many who exhibit such a broad horizontal grasp of complex technical concepts combined with an elegant and concise way of expressing this knowledge (e.g. via Eve). I'd surely bet on this guy again.
_bxg1 9y ago
The IDE has some interesting ideas but I'm not convinced that the language itself is actually particularly intuitive. I would love to see a JavaScript IDE (Atom extension?) with features like - "Prose-style", where comments are a first-class citizen and code lives inside blocks. Seems like this would go a long way to encourage thorough commenting. - The checkbox-style thing, where you can easily mix different pieces from different files on the screen at once. That was incredibly slick. The general idea of abstracting code constructs away from the literal files they live in is something that's been bouncing around in my head for a while. - The state export was pretty cool, though it's not clear to me that could easily be implemented without controlling the language itself.
mamcx 9y ago
The thing where this fall apart is try to get away from imperative, predictable code. That will NEVER (ie, to be on mainstream) work for large scale software OR attract non-experts. Try to make a "virtue" a "callback-hell" with other names is a futile idea (apart some specific scenarios). If is hard to debug, is hard to have a mental model of it, period. --- The other parts of the idea sound well, but is not clear how the magic is made or how create the "data store".
Roboprog 9y ago
One problem with literate programming: a large portion of the industry hates to document, and thinks that comments are EEEEVIL. Not me, but many. I would love to see something like literate programming become more mainstream, though. Even little things like having to repeat parameter names in a block above a function/routine, rather than simply next to each parameter, seems like it’s harder than it ought to be.

158 points by jhund 9y ago

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

WaxProlix 9y ago
I wonder what Chris Granger will almost-build next.
- FPGAhacker 9y ago
  What a nice thing to say.
  - WaxProlix 9y ago
    I'm actually a fan of his, and mostly mean it tongue in cheek. I kickstarted Light Table with my last $50 after paying rent one month in college and, while somewhat disappointed in the outcome of that project, remain generally supportive of his dream big/fall short approach.
    - FPGAhacker 9y ago
      Sorry for my reaction then. So much is lost in text posts.
      - canadaduane 9y ago
        I'm grateful for your reaction (and OP's response) because the clarification made a substantial difference in how I interpreted that.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mcfunk 9y ago
Thanks for linking this. The community response is quite something. "Even the short amount of time I wrote Eve taught me that programming doesn't need to be so complex. If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have believed you could program without loops. If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have thought twice about why all of the different layers of the stack communicated and passed data around in different ways. If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have believed you could just programming the happy case, because the runtime would run only the blocks of code that work with your state. Rest assured that rethinking and reimagining programming has a bigger movement now than when you started and you helped drive it. Ruben" (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/eve-talk/YFguOGkNrBo/r_S9hNcVAwAJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/eve-talk/YFguOGkNrBo/r_S9hNc...)
- RubenSandwich 9y ago
  That's me. I still think learning some Eve is worth your time just to see and experience something very different. You can get started here: http://play.witheve.com/#/examples/quickstart.eve http://play.witheve.com/#/examples/quickstart.eve. (This is Eve 0.2)
- kbd 9y ago
  > If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have believed you could program without loops. What's he referring to here?
  - RubenSandwich 9y ago
    Eve doesn't have loops, because the basic unit isn't a variable but a set of variables. So a computation is applied to every element in a value. e.g. x = [1, 2, 3] x + 2 // x = [3, 4, 5] I have since learned that APL does something similar, expect their basic unit is an array.
- weatherlight 9y ago
  > If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have believed you could program without loops recursion?

aarpmcgee 9y ago

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

hacker_9 9y ago
Maybe they haven't accepted it yet. Though their blog posts were always few and far apart.

amelius 9y ago

Is this related to the eveonline game?

grzm 9y ago
No.
Sohcahtoa82 9y ago
You could have clicked the link and found out for yourself in like 5 seconds.

grzm 9y ago

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

weatherlight 9y ago

it looks (superficially) a lot like Elm.

acobster 9y ago
It's more in the logical programming paradigm than the functional paradigm, IIRC.

smt88 9y ago

I'm a huge advocate of bringing usability/ergonomic considerations to programming languages. That said, I have strong opinions about syntax decisions that hinder those goals. For example, writing out words instead of using symbols is easier to understand at first glance, but it's much harder to skim (even after becoming familiar with the language). SQL is a really hard language to skim. Of course, the opposite end of the spectrum (C is close) is also hard to skim.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
So is APL easy to skim?
- munificent 9y ago
  You're being snarky, but I think there's something to the parent comment. I like the idea that most of the words that someone sees in a program are words in the domain of the program itself — its nouns and verbs — and not words in the domain of the underlying implementation language. For example, though I visually like the way Ruby's "begin" and "end" look for delimiters, I think braces are better in that they reduce the "word clutter" of the code. You can probably take this too far. I wouldn't want to use punctuation for control flow. But perhaps that's an argument that, like Smalltalk, control flow should be an API and not built in syntax.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Syntax highlighting usually is used to set apart the language's keywords from the rest of the program. They become less like words and more like standard symbols.
    - smt88 9y ago
      I agree. I prefer to have both. It's hard to argue that either SQL or Brainfuck is more readable than, say, JavaScript (to an experienced eye), so a happy medium must exist.
    - 9y ago

jdbernard 9y ago

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

kybernetikos 9y ago
Having followed the project I don't think it's fair to assume that those working on it didn't understand why developers like vim. It's more just that traditional developers doing traditional developer things weren't the most important part of their target market. A lot of thought and experiment went into what became eve.
- jdbernard 9y ago
  Yeah, it's been a while since this effort has come up on my radar. Now that I'm remembering a little more, these are the same guys who were behind light-table, I think. So I guess it's fair to say that they've thought deeply about the problem. I still think that the path they are exploring will not bear fruit as in my opinion they seem to have a core, almost axiomatic disbelief in the inherent difficulty of software development and a corresponding disdain for the patterns of work that have led to what is actually productive today. I think that software development is fundamentally, irreducibly hard. Poor tooling can certainly makes it more inaccessible and good tooling can certainly make it more accessible, but the real difficultly is conceptual and not due to the nature to any particular language or tooling. Therefore tooling and language alone cannot make it fundamentally easier. I'm glad someone is exploring it. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this will yield promising results. But so far it seems like every time this kind of work come around again it continues to make big promises without concrete benefit. At best it provides a more gentle introduction for beginners, which is a good thing. But I have yet to see anything that would provide to me as a professional even half the utility and "accessibility" of my current toolset. Typically many of the simplifications they make in the name of accessibility become more of a hindrance than a help as you advance past the beginning stages.
abritinthebay 9y ago

iamwil 9y ago

One of the more interesting parts (to me) about Eve wasn't the interactive programming or the literate programming, but that it included a database inside of the programming language. Most programming languages think of a database as a thing separate to it (I think Smalltalk is an exception). Hence, they needed language constructs to make it easier to talk to databases. As a result, Eve was inspired by the Bloom language being researched at Berkeley, which was in turn inspired by an old language called Datalog. In it, they take constraints of a declarative language (like SQL) and use it to make distributed computing a lot easier. "Our main data-structure was now a tree of tables. Rather than one big top-level function, we switched to a pipeline of functions. Each function pulled data out of the global store using a datalog query, ran some computation and wrote data back. Having less nesting reduced the impact of lexical scope and cursor passing. Using datalog allowed normalising the data store, avoiding all the issues that came from hierarchical models. At this point we realised we weren't building a functional language anymore. Most of the programs were just datalog queries on normalised tables with a little scalar computation in the middle. We were familiar with Bloom and realised that it fit our needs much better than the functional pidgin we had built so far - no lexical scoping, no data-structures, no explicit ordering. In late March we began work on a Bloom interpreter." http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2014/10/16/retrospective/ http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2014/10/16/retrospective/ Here's a talk by Peter Alvaro (doing research with Bloom) about it, and I had to watch it 4 to 6 times to really get everything out of it. He makes a shout out to Eve at the end (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Aa4PivG0g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Aa4PivG0g). The Bloom guys are the same guys that released the paper to Anna, the KV store just 11 days ago. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551072)

nickpsecurity 9y ago
Another example is combining a database with LISP via AllegroCache: https://franz.com/products/allegrocache/ https://franz.com/products/allegrocache/ IBM took the idea further with AS/400 integrating one at OS-level for various apps to use that OS could manage for them.
scriptproof 9y ago
"Excited, we presented our prototype to a small number of non-programmers and sat back to watch the magic. To our horror, not a single one of them could figure out what the simple example program did or how it worked, nor could they produce any useful programs themselves." (From the article linked above). As a programmer, I had the same reaction, actually.

JasonFruit 9y ago

I was just reading about Light Table's denouement and how Eve was in a way its successor, and now I find Eve has gone about the same way. It looks like both projects foundered because the problems they addressed --- representing code in non-linear ways with changes live-propagating through the system's state --- are very, very hard, apparently harder than Chris et al. realized. In retrospect, their harsh words about our current languages and tools representing a 1970s mindset come across as hubris.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 9y ago
> In retrospect, their harsh words about our current languages and tools representing a 1970s mindset come across as hubris. Nah, I think the hubris is thinking you could make a business with a near-horizon payoff fixing the problem they accurately identified. I can't think of any “build a new language” startups that have succeeded (I'm sure there's one out there somewhere, though.) Getting a language established is a long slog, unless you've got a mega-user as a partner from day one, which mostly happens when the project is developed internally by that mega-user.
- currymj 9y ago
  definitely not recently but I think MATLAB, Mathematica, S, Stata, and lots of other commercial scientific/numerical packages could qualify. it may not be possible any more, though.
jbondeson 9y ago
As a KS backer of Light Table I always get sad about what might have been[1] if they hadn't gone the YC + VC route that basically lead to abandoning LT before it was near ready for daily use for most of us. We never did get to see the vision that was presented in that KS... [1] 2012 was two years before Brackets/Atom and three before VSCode.
- 9y ago

everdev 9y ago

I love this idea. I've always thought the disconnect between documentation and code felt a bit repetitive. Why not write a Markdown doc that compiles to code? Especially with a system like Rails, where so much can be auto-generated. Obviously this isn't for mission-critical or new ideas, but for putting your CRUD app into the world, it makes total sense.

pcnix 9y ago
This particular part of it isn't a new idea though, it's literate programming, been around since Knuth.
- cmontella 9y ago
  Literate Programming as put forth by Knuth always involved a "tangle" process in which source code and documentation is formatted into a literate document. This is due to the forced order of statements compilers impose on most programming languages. What was different in Eve was that the entire language was unordered, and thus you don't need a tool-chain to read literate source -- the raw source itself is literate.
  - zenhack 9y ago
    Yeah, I've seen a fair bit literate code that is awkwardly structured to satisfy ordering needed by the underlying language. It works better in languages that don't care about the order of declarations, of which there are many, but usually there's something at the top to the effect of "we need to start off with a pile of imports, because compiler." Haskell will recognize a .lhs extension and do comments by default, using > to prefix lines that are actual code (looks block-quote like). Frankly I am something of a skeptic of literate programming. In most of the literate source code I've read, the code is clearer than the prose anyway, and having every detail in comments just makes the whys and the high level design harder to find. My approach is to basically assume the reader is familiar with the language and the key libraries, document the whys, overall design, and the api contracts, and try to pick good variables and write clear code. This is not to say "inline comments are bad," but I find that usually when I find myself writing a lot of comments explaining the details it's because I'm writing a lot of confusing code.

dragonwriter 9y ago

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

ModernMech 9y ago
v0.4 was missing documentation and some other habitability improvements, but in its current state it was by far the most useful Eve. You can download it here if you want to try it out: https://github.com/witheve/eve-native https://github.com/witheve/eve-native

matte_black 9y ago

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

marshray 9y ago
This is something you posted 15 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16625687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16625687 > No Klik & Play?! It was the reason I can say I was building and distributing my own games back in 5th grade! > No Lego Mindstorms!? I was building Robots with six degrees of freedom in middle school! I think you, in fact, do understand the value of human-oriented programming.
- matte_black 9y ago
  I’m not sure if I’d generalize my own experiences to the general public. Even though I used simple drag and drop interfaces to create programs before, I was also tinkering with HTML and JavaScript, so they weren’t a gateway to real coding. My time spent with actual programming languages greatly accelerated my learning. I’d argue that programming languages are already human oriented, it’s not like we’re putting together programs with assembly or binary code like some people imagine. And syntax and conventions improve all the time to make it easier. If you want to be able to simply speak a program’s requirements and watch it happen, there’s already a solution for that: hire a coder.
  - nkrisc 9y ago
    > If you want to be able to simply speak a program’s requirements and watch it happen, there’s already a solution for that: hire a coder. If everyone had this attitude we'd still be traveling between cities on foot. Based on their demo, it appears the purpose of the language was to push the "human centered" aspect of it even further, and not to settle for what's possible today.

GrinningFool 9y ago

The action-response mechanism reminds me of the Easel programming language: http://www.eslsyndetic.com/Documentation/overview_of_responses_and_their_uses.html http://www.eslsyndetic.com/Documentation/overview_of_respons... It was a cool model, if a bit ahead of its time. Good to see the idea living on.

norswap 9y ago

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

hacker_9 9y ago

Thoughts on why this project was dumped by investors: I think the problem they really had from the beginning was they were pressuring themselves to innovate in an industry that is already decades old. You can't raise $2 mil and not feel the pressure to perform, and sadly this is not how innovation works. So instead they kept releasing prototypes that didn't really make sense or remotely scale: - turning sql into graphs that made a 2 line statement take up the whole screen - the database language that had no performance characteristics at all - the bouncing ball demo that seems to only be made to create a bouncing ball, and yet doesn't add more understanding to the process anyway - the imperative language written in 'english' (but of course only accepts the english words and specific grammar the software understands) and so on. Not trying to be harsh, but this is probably a good thing. Once they take a break and move on to other things, a ton of ideas will no doubt come flooding in, just because they aren't under the same scrutiny and pressure anymore.

zubairq 9y ago
As one of the investors I think it is strong language when you say "dumped", and not really true in my opinion. You have to remember that there are still many people who want to back this as a project. One of the big issues is that it is a really hard problem technically to solve with many "unknown" "unknowns". And yes, I agree that many ideas will flood in because of this, and Chris Granger and Rob Attori and co have already influenced many other people and projects, they are in my opinion the thought leaders in this new programming space, and as a consequence have already influenced the entire industry with their ideas. In any case, they influenced me, and if they influenced just one person, that is enough for me :)
- canada_dry 9y ago
  I had only just learned of Eve through this post, and watched a bunch of Chris' videos... I was blown away by him! I've been in tech a long time and have known lots of extremely bright people. But, I've not met many who exhibit such a broad horizontal grasp of complex technical concepts combined with an elegant and concise way of expressing this knowledge (e.g. via Eve). I'd surely bet on this guy again.

_bxg1 9y ago

The IDE has some interesting ideas but I'm not convinced that the language itself is actually particularly intuitive. I would love to see a JavaScript IDE (Atom extension?) with features like - "Prose-style", where comments are a first-class citizen and code lives inside blocks. Seems like this would go a long way to encourage thorough commenting. - The checkbox-style thing, where you can easily mix different pieces from different files on the screen at once. That was incredibly slick. The general idea of abstracting code constructs away from the literal files they live in is something that's been bouncing around in my head for a while. - The state export was pretty cool, though it's not clear to me that could easily be implemented without controlling the language itself.

mamcx 9y ago

The thing where this fall apart is try to get away from imperative, predictable code. That will NEVER (ie, to be on mainstream) work for large scale software OR attract non-experts. Try to make a "virtue" a "callback-hell" with other names is a futile idea (apart some specific scenarios). If is hard to debug, is hard to have a mental model of it, period. --- The other parts of the idea sound well, but is not clear how the magic is made or how create the "data store".

Roboprog 9y ago

One problem with literate programming: a large portion of the industry hates to document, and thinks that comments are EEEEVIL. Not me, but many. I would love to see something like literate programming become more mainstream, though. Even little things like having to repeat parameter names in a block above a function/routine, rather than simply next to each parameter, seems like it’s harder than it ought to be.