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Eve: Programming designed for humans

programming.witheve.com

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Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#31

Post by taneq »

This smells like a game maker app, in the sense that it's hiding "all that messy coding stuff" behind "a simple friendly interface."

Programming isn't about syntax. It's about telling the computer exactly what you want it to do, in every possible situation. The hard part isn't the language you use to tell the computer what to do. The hard part is making sure the instructions you're giving match what you want to happen.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but every time I've encountered something that's meant to 'make programming easier', once you get beyond 'hello world' all it does is get in the way. You still have to communicate the same amount of information to the computer, but now you're doing it with duplo blocks instead of a milling machine.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#32

Post by bpicolo »

thefalcon wrote: post #9
zenobit256 wrote: post #7

Sorry, but what about this is "designed for humans"? What do the keywords mean? What's the language paradigm? Why do I want this when it's essentially coalescing a lot of APIs into a language that you've provided no spec for? Why would I want my language to work with slack?! I'm not impressed. It just looks like another functional language with a bunch of addons tacked on to make things "easier" or "for humans". Drop…

As a counterpoint: the example of the document containing blocks of code inside what looked more like a word document, to me, exactly explains visually what "designed for humans" means in this context, and I think it's well put.

You can do this with Jupyter notebooks.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#33

Post by zenobit256 »

napworth wrote: post #25
zenobit256 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but that doesn't give the connotation that it's "designed for humans". Perhaps if they could give a clear indication of what that means other than "it's in a word document", I'd be more inclined to look at it a little harder.

Wow dude, you're really salty.

Skeptical is now salty?

I fear for your bullshitometer. You should get it repaired.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#34

Post by DonaldFisk »

First impressions: I like the look of this language/IDE. It's not general purpose but it seems to be good at what it does. I think live programming - where you make changes to your code and immediately see the effect without having to recompile and restart your system - is the way forward. The adoption of literate programming is interesting - I think commenting code is unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons and am looking for an alternative, and Knuth's idea might be worth building on. The other idea I like is the ability to point at a widget and find out the code that draws it - that makes debugging a lot easier.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#35

Post by BrandonM »

zenobit256 wrote: post #7

Sorry, but what about this is "designed for humans"? What do the keywords mean? What's the language paradigm? Why do I want this when it's essentially coalescing a lot of APIs into a language that you've provided no spec for? Why would I want my language to work with slack?! I'm not impressed. It just looks like another functional language with a bunch of addons tacked on to make things "easier" or "for humans". Drop…

I thought the video was a good example of "designed for humans". Did you watch it?

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#36

Post by mkozlows »

ibdknox wrote: post #2

Hi All! Many of the folks here have been following us for a long time and we're really excited to finally pull everything together to show you all where our research has taken us. Eve is still very early [1], but it shows a lot of promise and I think this community especially will be interested in the ideas we've put together. As many of you were also big Light Table supporters, we wanted to talk about Eve's relation…

So your defense of literate program gives, as a defense, what I would think of as an attack on literate programming:

  Take this strawman for instance, how could you find the bug in 
  the following code without the accompanying comment?

  // Print every other line of the array to the console
  for (var i = 0; i
Because the problem with that is that now you have two competing sources of authority -- the comment, and the code. One of them is right and one of them is wrong. But which is the right one?

In the real world, the answer is almost always "the code that's actually been executing, rather than the comment that hasn't," which is why it's a good idea to minimize commentry of that type, to prevent confusion on the part of the reader.

So if you're doubling-down on literate programming, how do you address that problem? That article says, "Inconsistencies between the code and the prose are themselves errors in the program and they should be treated as seriously as a buffer overflow," but does Eve actually do that? It's hard for me to see how it could, in the examples given.

(If the idea is simply that this is extra work for the programmer to do -- that they need to describe every implementation twice, once in code and once in English -- I submit that it's not very human-focused at all, if those humans are programmers.)

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#37

Post by lnlkndlfng »

> Sorry, but what about this is "designed for humans"?

In the mind of the author it probably means 'Designed for reasonable humans and not those dirty nerds who write Haskell and shit.'

Edit: Jesus, why the fuck is everyone getting triggered over this? HN has the most sensitive snowflakes out of any discussion forum.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#38

Post by mst »

king_magic wrote: post #28

How is this significantly different from something like Light Table? (edit: didn't realize it was build by the people who built Light Table). It feels like a rehash of that + Python notebooks, with a bit of Xcode's playground thrown in. Problem is that despite those tools being available, I literally never use them. Ever. Nor do I have a need for them. I kind of like the idea of being able to find bits of code in a l…

> How is this significantly different from something like Light Table?

Well, it's effectively 'Light Table version 2'.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#39

Post by zubairq »

empath75 wrote: post #24
zenobit256 wrote: post #7

Sorry, but what about this is "designed for humans"? What do the keywords mean? What's the language paradigm? Why do I want this when it's essentially coalescing a lot of APIs into a language that you've provided no spec for? Why would I want my language to work with slack?! I'm not impressed. It just looks like another functional language with a bunch of addons tacked on to make things "easier" or "for humans". Drop…

Don't think of it as a replacement for javascript. Think of it as a replacement for excel.

yes I totally agree. I work with data scientists and doctors needing small workflow applications and this would be perfect for them

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#40

Post by empath75 »

king_magic wrote: post #28

How is this significantly different from something like Light Table? (edit: didn't realize it was build by the people who built Light Table). It feels like a rehash of that + Python notebooks, with a bit of Xcode's playground thrown in. Problem is that despite those tools being available, I literally never use them. Ever. Nor do I have a need for them. I kind of like the idea of being able to find bits of code in a l…

> How is this significantly different from something like Light Table?

It's written by the same people that wrote Light Table.

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