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Eve: Programming designed for humans

programming.witheve.com

151–160 of 401 posts

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#151

Seeing Eve's development out in the open is inspiring. Many of the commenters are coming from positions of extreme skepticism towards new approaches to programming, probably justified by the history of the field, but I'd recommend to spend some more time looking into the research idbknox and his team have been conducting (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8 , for instance) and how much they have iterated…

Solid questions!

1. We could be more clear about this, but expanding to suit the needs of non-programmers is still very much in the cards. It falls under the umbrella of milestone 3 [1].

2. We're very interested in improving the process of generating UI. To start with, that will mean expanding our library of views (essentially Eve's version of web components) to cover a wider range of common use cases. Beyond that though, HTML is pretty crufty with layers upon layers of of additions and legacy support, it would be very interesting to explore alternative markup models.

3. It certainly is very important. Our model for interacting with the external world is pretty simple. For the most part You can use our first party modules (like `@http` for web requests) to pull the requisite data into Eve where you can transform it into whatever shape is appropriate. For cases where you need entirely new transport systems (like connecting Eve to USB devices), you can create a new module just like the first party ones and side load it in. Since the runtime is currently written in Typescript, that's the language of choice for these extensions. We may support others in the future.

4. For users unfamiliar with HTML and CSS, the best we can do is insulate them from it, as in #2. If it's a subject that personally interests you, I'd love to strike up a conversation on the mailing list about how we can improve the markup process [2].

[1] http://programming.witheve.com/#justataste [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/eve-talk

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#152
I celebrate trying this. The last time that there was serious attempt at this was Smalltalk and it had a great impact on the industry. Itself a great balance of friendly instant feedback and great control. There is also Apple's Playgrounds now with Swift trying more or less on this. Definitively the instant feedback is a key component in having the right introduction to computing. If we extend this idea we'll find that we need this in the debugger too. It works because is the best way to replace imagination and assumptions with perceptions.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#154

"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…

That's what I was thinking. I'm a human, I like my Vim and C. The main limitation of a language like that is that, if you care about performance at all, you have to program for the machine first, not for humans. You're always writing for both to some extent. For me this is the main challenge of programming; writing code that executes efficiently and correctly, and that is legible to humans. I love Python and other hi…

Yup, and even if you don't care much about performance, you still have higher level languages which are good enough.

That's why I wonder where Eve fits in. Most people don't want to program. And this is NOT because they're stupid. It's because they have tons of other important things to worry about. Most people don't want to build their own TV set. They buy it because their expertise is in other things. Maybe they're a doctor. Maybe they're a fields medal winning mathematician. Heck, I'm a programmer and deal with all kinds of programming languages but don't want to know what's going on inside my TV set.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#156

Earlier 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…

>So you feel that programmers are more inclined to treat the function name as an authority, as opposed to a comment. Is that an accurate? I'm curious what lead you to this conclusion.

I think this is a reasonable claim, even though as you've said there's nothing strictly enforcing this behavior. Function names are generally highlighted by the editor/IDE, and the developer is forced to stare at them and at least begin to type them out while calling them. They're brief and repeated over and over again in the source code. They're just harder to ignore. Comments on the other hand only appear once per comment, tend to be italicized and greyed out by IDEs, are generally at least one sentence in length and can span multiple paragraphs, and are never going to be directly referenced from within the code itself. It's still very possible to change a function without updating its name to suit its new purpose. But I know for me personally I'm much more prone to missing comments that I need to now delete or reword. I have to acknowledge the function name when I write code calling it or read code referencing it, but comments are just sort of there, hovering in the background. It's easier to read them once and then tune them out and forget that they're there.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#157

"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…

That's what I was thinking. I'm a human, I like my Vim and C. The main limitation of a language like that is that, if you care about performance at all, you have to program for the machine first, not for humans. You're always writing for both to some extent. For me this is the main challenge of programming; writing code that executes efficiently and correctly, and that is legible to humans. I love Python and other hi…

I've seen a few of the "excel crowd" comments so far. Could you imagine the performance of this system if they really let a few of the "excel people" make their own charts and graphs like are in that video? It would destroy the system in short order, I'm guessing.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#158

I 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…

Is this a response to the literate programming aspect of Eve that's presented? The actual datalog code that is written seems quite succinct for what it accomplishes.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#159
post #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.

I think they were trying to emphasize that their strength in "readability", hence Medium.

I watched the video, and immediately realized I would never want to program in that kind of environment. The "literate programming" would get in my way.

It would be like having someone follow me all the time and translate my words in realtime right next to me whenever I speak something. (Actually it's more like me saying something in English AND having to translate after every sentence) It's super distracting because I can't focus on what I'm saying because I lose my train of thought.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#160
post #83
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does more of the heavy lifting automatically. For example, rather than having to explicitly build a data structure to keep track of events that have happened, or build some message bus to receive and react to them, Eve allows you to express the fact that you want to react to them, and its runtime takes care of the rest. How well this scales and remains available, well, that's an implementation challenge, but the u…

What you describe is normally handled by any number of perfectly good libraries. The selling point here seems to be "we've thrown a bunch of random libraries together in the standard library", which isn't a super compelling argument to me.

Could you share an example library or framework that allows a programming model similar to what they demonstrate in the video? I'd like to learn more.

I am aware of frameworks that can pass information around in similar ways, but only with a lot more ceremony of the sort that's not necessarily a benefit. Observe specifically the code blocks with "search" that react to events without needing to be connected in any direct way with event production; and event production doesn't need to involve data structures or storage.

Maybe this model won't work in applications of meaningful scale, but maybe it will.

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