Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Eve: Programming designed for humans

programming.witheve.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 401 posts

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#171

Post by noonespecial »

jbclements wrote: post #150

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…

This seems to always happen when people try to make programming "more human". Programming languages succeed by walling off ambiguity. The better and faster they do it, the stronger the language, even if the syntax looks ugly.

Even your example shows it instantly. We know how to read 3x+49 but would have to ask of "thrice the value of x plus 49", "did you mean 3 times what you get from adding 49 and x or 49 more than 3 x's?".

Projects to humanize programming always seem to suffer from "magic genie" syndrome. When you ask a genie for $1mm you don't expect him to go rob a bank or kill your dad for his life insurance to get it. Human language makes tons of implicit assumptions about the recipient. It would take a general (strong) AI to make that work with a computer.

The ultimate expression of success would have your "program" simply read "I'd like a game just like Flappy Bird but with my logo instead of the bird".

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#173

Post by tigershark »

cmontella wrote: post #162
0xffff2 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't address at all what forces the programmer to keep the prose and code in sync. If you still have code that's read and translated by the compiler, and prose that's ignored by the compiler completely, how have you actually changed anything?

Well, I don't think anything can force the programmer to keep the prose and code in sync. The best we can do is give you an incentive to do so. The argument that was presented is that comments will get out of sync with code, but we're trying to provide tooling that will incentivize you to keep code and comments in sync. I'd also like to say that if code is easier to read in the first place, there will be more eyes on…

You can simply use BDD to keep in sync the requirements with the code. But BDD is not just prose, it is much much more powerful and useful.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#174

Post by oldmanjay »

jbclements wrote: post #150

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…

The comments don't define the syntax, so your example doesn't provide much oomph. I don't consider it a strawman, I consider your argument to be based on a misapprehension.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#175

Post by andreyk »

Very exciting. Feels predictable that there is some push-back from all us programmers used to 'normal' languages (and the wording on some of this does not help), but when you think about the language itself and not the 'Medium-like' IDE I find it genuinely very interesting. The whole threading and records concepts here are neat...

As always the question is whether it will scale - being so distributed code-wise seems to imply it will also be hard to trace errors or perhaps at some point increase confusion. Would this work for giant complicated apps/websites? Would be nice to see examples/attempts at that.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#176

Post by lfowles »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #154
greenshackle2 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I haven't looked in depth at Eve, but it sounds like it's a bridge for the people that _do_ want to program but don't want (or even need) to understand the underlying complexity. As a close to home example, I've had several game ideas I've wanted to program for a while. Simple things, I've had notebooks describing behaviors and what should happen when in the game for years. My day job is software development, but I haven't been able to grok a game engine enough to implement playable versions of these games.

In other words, I don't want to build my own TV set but I do want the favorite channels menu on my TV set to behave slightly differently.... perhaps it has profiles for each family member. Conceptually simple but hard as hell to execute from scratch.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#177

Post by falcolas »

rifung wrote: post #75
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…

Hi, I apologize if this is off topic but I just thought you should know the site does not display properly in my browser. Maybe this is just an unsupported use case but I think it's because the browser window isn't wide enough so the text on the left gets cut off. I have my browser window filling up half of the screen. EDIT: works now!

I can't scroll down currently.

Firefox 49.0.2

Makes it very hard to read.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#178

Post by zubairq »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #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 th…

Actually Apple Playgrounds and SWIFT were inspired by the Eve team's previous project, Light Table. Chris Lattner, the creator of SWIFT even publicly acklowledges Light Table as inspiration on his blog:

http://www.nondot.org/sabre/

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#179

Post by ibdknox »

ifdefdebug wrote: post #138
cmontella wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Well, I did skim a little bit through Eve's source code, specifically the files in https://github.com/witheve/Eve/tree/master/src and subs, and the first thing that stroke me was: it's not literate. As a matter of fact, it doesn't have more comments than an average code base, maybe even less. Why? Where is the prose? What makes programs supposed to be written in Eve different from Eve itself?

Trying to do literate programming in traditional languages is pretty crappy [1]. Some heroic effort ended up having to go into this release as well so things aren't as commented as we wanted, but that will improve. There are a few files that are pretty good though [2].

Our Eve source on the other hand is wonderfully literate and it's been a really great experience. Here's the code that makes the inspector work [3].

[1]:http://programming.witheve.com/deepdives/literate.html

[2]: https://github.com/witheve/Eve/blob/master/src/runtime/join....

[3]: http://play.witheve.com/#/examples/editor.eve

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#180

Post by cmontella »

noonespecial wrote: post #171
jbclements wrote: post #150

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…

This seems to always happen when people try to make programming "more human". Programming languages succeed by walling off ambiguity . The better and faster they do it, the stronger the language, even if the syntax looks ugly. Even your example shows it instantly. We know how to read 3x+49 but would have to ask of "thrice the value of x plus 49", "did you mean 3 times what you get from adding 49 and x or 49 more than…

Actually, we agree completely with this view. We tried going down this path [1], and ultimately concluded it was the wrong direction, for many of the reasons you point out here.

But Eve is a full programming language. The "humane" aspects are not about making the language more ambiguous, but about changing the focus of tooling from the machine to the human. It's about things as simple as Unicode support for language localization. Or rendering headers in your code. It's about making the syntax and semantics very small and easy to understand. It's about closing the write-compile-test loop, by showing the result of code /in/ the actual code. It's about debugging tools that work with you to solve a problem.

We're just saying we don't want to compromise. We want a beautiful, concise, easy to understand language AND we want humane tooling. In order to get that, we had to abandon the traditional imperative programming model, and that comes at a cost. But I think in the long term it will be worth it.

[1]: http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2016/06/14/nlqp/

Post reply on HN