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Eve: Programming designed for humans

programming.witheve.com

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Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#101

Post by hacker_9 »

mkozlows wrote: post #36
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.…

I agree, if I'm writing a paragraph of english followed by a paragraph of code... what's the point? Comments at the moment are generally one liners and can quickly get outdated if not maintained.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#102

Post by lnlkndlfng »

oldmanjay wrote: post #68
lnlkndlfng wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your edit sure won't help anything, the aggression is just uncalled for. Ok bud, shall we call an emergency UN meeting to discuss my 'aggression'?

I'm far from taking it personally, so no need from my end. What do you hope to accomplish with the antagonistic tone?

BTW, went through your post history and it seems you just comment telling people how to behave and telling everyone how sensitive you are while contributing nothing of value whatsoever. What a clown.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#103

Post by cmontella »

mkozlows wrote: post #36
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.…

Right, this is exactly the argument we are making. Given just the block of code above, we don't know enough to make the determination. Who is right? We can't possibly no without more. That's why commenting code is not enough, and that's why literate program is important.

Imagine if you came across this in actual code. You might first check if the code was changed recently and by whom, and whether the comment or the code came first. But that still wouldn't tell the whole story. To get it all, you would find out who checked in the code, and what their original intent was.

What we're advocating is to treat source code more like a design document. It's a collection of thousands of design decisions all informing the specification of the final product, the program.

> 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

Right, so the point is that prose is not redundant. As Knuth put it literate programming is "a mixture of formal and informal methods that reinforce each other." When we communicate to one another face-to-face, we use gestures, expressions, intonation, etc. to articulate an idea. On the internet, when we communicate with just text, much of my meaning is lost forever and never apparent to anyone who reads this.

Programming is much the same way. The code only tells you so much about the program. Without any context, readers are often disoriented and confused by new codebases. If no one is willing to read your code, no one will ever contribute to it. GitHub and SourceForge are veritable graveyards of amazing yet abandoned projects that will never see another contribution, because their codebases are so inscrutable. I know I'm guilty of this as well; when I revisit old codebases, I hardly know even what I was thinking.

Anyway, I think there's a lot to explore here. I think what you raise is an issue, and it will always be important to address, but I really believe that literate programming is important and can lead to better code. So we're going to see where we can take it with Eve, and I hope you'll give it a shot!

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#104

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

"An IDE like Medium, not Vim"

What's wrong with Vim? I think they're trying to cater to "the non-programmer crowd" with this, but by trying so hard it's alienating real programmers. I love vim, and I hate Medium with passion. I'm sure there are a lot of other HN people who are not so much a fan of the types of people who just write meta posts, rant posts, listicle posts, self help posts, growth hacking posts on Medium and call themselves a "maker" without actually building anything meaningful. So, you've lost me there Eve. Anyway, that aside, looking more into how this tool really works, this is NOT something an everyday Joe will use like they speak English. This is an actual programming language. The language itself is no easier than python or ruby (actually subjectively speaking the syntax is less intuitive than python for example).

Also I think they're imagining that Excel users will just eat this up, since it's kind of like how people run pseudo-programs on excel documents. But people used those because Excel was the most popular app that lets them work with numbers back then. Now there are many ways to achieve what Eve is trying to do, plus Excel. Why would any lay person jump on an obscure technology doesn't do anything significantly new?

Overall I think there's a problem with assuming that this is for "humans" just because it's "literate programming". "Humans" don't want all this literate programming stuff exposed. They just want to push a button and take care of things. On the other hand, programmers (I guess we should call them "non-humans") don't need all this literate programming stuff. They are trained to understand how programming languages work. They may think this is neat at first, but very soon will start to think all these comments are getting in the way.

I have personally never seen any programming related technology titled "... for humans" actually work for "humans". Perhaps because these tend to be built by extremely talented programmers who are too talented that they are out of touch with how their grandma uses computers, they probably think their creations are easy enough for "humans".

Sorry if this sounded too negative. I am willing to discuss and correct my comments if I am wrong about anything.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#105

Post by lopatin »

lnlkndlfng wrote: post #71
oldmanjay wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm far from taking it personally, so no need from my end. What do you hope to accomplish with the antagonistic tone?

To weed out all of the ostensibly sensitive turds and add them to the turd list.

Maybe some people here are sensitive to bad words and their favorite language being called out. Another possibility about why you're being downvoted is maybe your comments aren't as funny as you think?

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#106

Post by joshuafcole »

nercht12 wrote: post #84

Seems to me it will have some good uses. The promo of it being "more human" is a stretch, yes, esp. given the actual programming language didn't look any friendlier than any other language imo (e.g. world http://programming.witheve.com/deepdives/whateveis.html "Being explicitly designed for data transformation, there are somethings that Eve will particularly excel at..." (after beta stage, of course) That said, it'll…

Heh, as another commenter said below, "i see the first problem is that you're generating HTML". The nice thing is, that is in no way intrinsic to Eve. The @browser DB is a regular DB like any other that we happen to sync to the client, and the client has a bit of code (which users will be able to extend in the future with other functionality) that takes HTML-shaped records and turns them into actual DOM on the screen.

Since we are targeting programmers first right now, it seemed better to focus on other aspects of the editing experience than to try and re-invent document markup to start with. That said, we're not opposed to exploring that possibility down the road. If you have any thoughts on the subject I'd love to strike up a conversation on the mailing list [1].

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/eve-talk

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#107

Post by sbuttgereit »

mkozlows wrote: post #36
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.…

I don't know that I really agree with this criticism. I don't think having the additional context gives you two authorities which you are helpless to reason about. The code will tell you what is happening regardless of what is intended, the comments will tell you what was intended regardless of what is happening. More often than not, having both of these pieces can tell you where inconsistencies in the larger picture have arisen and you can use your own judgement to figure out what it all means and what you might do next. Maybe I'm biased because I'm pretty proficient in the business domains I specialize in, so I can understand, conceptually, what the application is suppose to support and consider the validity of the programmer's intent as well as the code's function.

But I'm not sure why it would be considered beneficial to withhold knowledge of intent in favor of purely what's happening; except maybe to junior/support staff that aren't likely to understand the motivation behind a developer's intent. Perhaps, because of the concern that code gets maintained and related commentary doesn't?

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#108

Post by machiaweliczny »

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…

It's high-level language so it's closer to how people think than how machines operate.

EDIT: all program has to do is to 1) get data 2) transform data 3) output data

Anything that allows to express these 3 steps using less idioms is more "human" language IMO

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#109

Post by loeber »

I like the look of this project, and it's in many ways inspiring, but here's my cynical take:

I think that Eve won't be conducive to creating applications beyond a few hundred lines of code -- after that, the "human-friendly" programming paradigm becomes an obstacle to production. Once people actually understand how the code works, the document style becomes superfluous.

I suspect that Eve will be a great learning tool and pique the interest of those who would otherwise never program, but Eve will be an introductory tool that users will inevitably graduate from to other languages that are perhaps more powerful, concise, and scale better.

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