Hey Taneq,
The fear of over-simplification is totally reasonable. Programs like Game Maker certainly gain their shallow learning curves at the expense of overall power, precision, and depth. We don’t think that tradeoff is acceptable either. Luckily, there is a difference between architectural simplicity and “kid-friendliness”. That’s a big part of why we had to start from scratch and build a new language -- we needed something that was simple from its core if we wanted to make it simple to use without losing expressibility. Rather than rehash the specifics of our architectural decisions (though I encourage you to check out the blog and the upcoming deep dives if you’re interested!) let me describe briefly some problems I don’t have to deal with anymore when I use Eve.
- Asynchrony is pain-free (no imposed cost, no alternative syntaxes, no callback hell).
- Programs are live by default -- there’s no need manually listen for changes all over the place, and no falling out of sync.
- Programs are easily extensible -- because of the above, anything that conforms to the pattern for a block will get picked up by that block.
- Mocks, shims, and other injection patterns are free -- making testing and experimenting very easy.
- Refactoring is trivial -- If a block changes, I only ever need to change its immediate downstream users to get back to a working state. Eve can find those for me.
- Everything is data, so state sharing is trivial. When a coworker finds a bug in my code they can save their exact state and send it to me with a single command.
- The number of classes of bug are drastically reduced. This doesn’t mean they aren’t occasionally perplexing, but because there are so few ways for a program to fail, I can literally run through a checklist of possibilities while debugging. This is the premise that powers the inspector.
This certainly isn’t a complete list, but it’s a few of my favorite quality of life improvements that I think sets this project apart. If you do get the chance to use it, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what works and what doesn’t for you.