If this takes of it will create an awesome dataset for a description to code ai!
Eve: Programming designed for humans
141–150 of 401 posts
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#142This 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 happe…
Well it's kind of like SQL, in some ways. With enough building blocks it can significantly make game development easier (reminds me a bit of Director's Lingo too). That said the problem arises when one wants to add functionality to the DSL, it's often extremely messy.
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#143Fantastic work. The 'story-like' literate programming is the direction in which programming will (should) move in the future imho. Visually, you could explore the idea of 'literal-visual' programming (just invented), something like: commit [#imageFor #student "student-icon.jpg"] Then have a button to toggle between rendering records as text and 'visual' records, in which "[#student ] is replaced with a pictogram. Now…
"The 'story-like' literate programming is the direction in which programming will (should) move in the future imho."
Check out Inform 7, too.
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#144Hi 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.…
This is why comments that specify what the code does are a "code smell".
Comments should explain things that are not obvious from the code. Comments should be things like
// Note: PCI-DSS requirements apply below
// Must check status register and FIFO to determine completion due to flaky hardware
// Algorithm below is modified Knuth-Morris-Pratt
// This is O(scary), but seems quick enough in practice.
(Now, if someone lets me put images in comments, that would be amazing. Good for state transition diagrams and random scribbles)
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#145"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 Mediu…
> What's wrong with Vim?
Emacs is better ;) But the comparison is a bit disingenuous. Medium is a blogging platform, VIM is an extensible text editor.
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#146While this is a very early version, something like it will eventually put most programmers out of work. Probably it'll be another language/tool and it won't be very soon, but at some point writing trivial software will actually be trivial.
It's ironic, being a programmer that automates things that people used to do manually, and kind of doing good but leaving someone unemployed. How fitting it will be to suddenly become mostly obsolete as a profession, due to programming being very easy or even done by AI. Dogfooding, anyone?
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#147Underwhelming so far. Literate programming sounds good, but sometimes it's too much text and you want to quickly scan a few lines of code and guess what's going on without reading that wall of text. I wonder if this is for regular programming or for occasional programmers (non-programmers really) to try "stuff" out.
Personally I find literate programming helpful not for simple programming tasks, but for really hard ones; if you can quickly scan a few lines of code and figure out what's going on, then you probably don't need it. But if it's the kind of code where I know even future-me is going to have a hard time understanding what I've implemented without copious comments, then I really like literate programming. And it's more t…
For code maintenance I've long since given up on assuming the comments are correct and simply read code and try to understand what is going on (and maybe read the comments later to see if they correlate to my understanding of the code). Many times I see that when fixing code, people don't update comments and a few times I've seen the comment indicates good intentions, but the code doesn't live up to the intentions :-).
But I do see your point about it for more complex programs and maybe more complex programs of your own (that a future you will have to maintain).
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well no, I think the argument is that this kind of comment gets outdated easily, so if the program works as expected, the comment is probably outdated (new requirement, the program was changed to print every line, forgetting about the comment). If the program does not work as expected, then it's a bug and the comment is still valid. This does not happen in your function name example: if the program requirement change…
> if the program requirement changed to print every line, no sane programmer would change the code in this function they'd write a new function printEveryLine() instead and use that. I'm not sure I understand the distinction you are making here, so I'd like to try and understand. From my perspective, function names are just another form of comment. After all, in many languages, as soon as you press "compile", your fu…
A function can be called from different places, maybe it will be used in code not yet written. So a programmer has a need to print every line. The code to be changed calls printEveryOtherLine. They won't change that function to print every line, because they know that would break things elsewhere.
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
But did your finger get unstuck? Did it get stuck during installing Gentoo? These things happen. Careful.
:o how did you know about my stuck finger! I need to learn to hack better to counter-hack people like you! ;) Fix confirmed!
:) . Could have been worse! Rather than Gentoo you could have attempted an OpenBSD install, and then https://xkcd.com/349/
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#150I think that Eve is tackling the wrong problem.
Allow me an analogy: "Bronk, the math designed for humans." Instead of dense algebraic expressions like "3x+49", you get to write "thrice the value of x plus 49." You may consider this a straw man, but I think that if you look hard at existing programming languages, you'll see that they are all designed for humans, and that the challenge in programming is in formulating your thoughts in a precise fashion. Should languages create higher-level abstractions to allow humans to reason about programs more efficiently? Yes! But that's not what this environment is about.
I do see one possible rebuttal to this, which would be an entirely different form of programming that is to traditional programming what google search is to the semantic web; that is, rather than specify programs precisely, we give examples to an approximate system and hope for the best. In many ways, that's how our biological systems work, and they've gotten us a long way. I don't see that happening in Eve, though.