> They want to make a better excel > They want to make a powerful, intuitive, database UI > They want to make a tool scientists can use to crunch and visualise

> They want to make a better excel > They want to make a powerful, intuitive, database UI > They want to make a tool scientists can use to crunch and visualise data These are basically all the same thing. Excel is generally used as a database / data cruncher. A relational DB with a similarly accessible learning curve could prevent many of the errors that riddle most spreadsheets. We add incrementally updated views to handle the data manipulation / crunching side (relatational aggregates are sufficiently expressive to handle most statistics / ML problems - http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/cs286/papers/bismarck-sigmod2012.pdf http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/cs286/papers/bismarck-sigmod2012.p...). > They want to make hypercard with modern programming languages backing it Papers like https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master/design/out-of-the-tar-pit.pdf https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master... and http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/eurosys10-boom.pdf http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/eurosys10-boom.pdf show how you can handle interactivity in a relational model. We have enough of this working that we bootstrapped the IDE. > They want to make a tool for professional programmers to focus on the hard problems Most of what I do as a professional programmer is not building abstractions or designing systems, but wrestling with incidental low-level detail, lack of visibility and tools that don't talk to each other. I've had enough experience with Eve to be convinced that I would be more productive. > ... over-promising and under-delivering. Obviously we are suffering from http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_distances/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_dista... since we have been thinking about this and working with it for months and all you have to go on is a few blog posts. I don't expect to convince you that we are right, but hopefully I can convince you that we have at least thought it through. We aren't trying to boil the ocean here - we are building a small set of tools that are applicable to lots of different problems. We've picked one problem to focus on for the first assault