This "for humans" shit has to stop.
Eve: Programming designed for humans
221–230 of 401 posts
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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." Non-programmer: OK, Eve sounds great, so, I want to search for a Slack message. How would I do that? Eve-programmer: Obviously, it's just: search @slack [#message from body…
This milestone is very much about making a programming environment, so you're right, that's still code. Though to address this strawman, compare that to what you would write in Java or even Python. Some of the best comments we've gotten is when we've shown people eve code and told them to ignore the symbols, just read the words. Their eyes really open up and they tell us pretty exactly what the block is doing. No, it…
Fair enough, but I thought an earlier goal of Eve was to bring programming to non-programmers? Did that change as Eve evolved, or am I just mis-remembering?
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#223I 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…
"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." Non-programmer: OK, Eve sounds great, so, I want to search for a Slack message. How would I do that? Eve-programmer: Obviously, it's just: search @slack [#message from body…
If we can eliminate software engineering as a profession our work will be done. There will be nothing left for humans to do, because at that point we will have invented a General AI.
Up until that point, software engineering will be a well paid job. I really don't understand this attitude that everyone should be a programmer or that programming should be easy. It isn't easy. Obviously, we should remove unnecessary friction from the process, but framing your thoughts precisely takes discipline. Building maintainable systems takes practice and understanding. It takes years of study and work to become a good engineer.
I definitely think people should be exposed to programming in school, but we study physics and chemistry there too and nobody expects everyone to be a physicist or chemical engineer. Specialization is a good thing.
That said, I'm down to compete with whatever you people think can replace me. I love a good challenge.
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#224Earlier 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.
We've already asked you to stop this, so we've banned this and your other accounts.
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
This milestone is very much about making a programming environment, so you're right, that's still code. Though to address this strawman, compare that to what you would write in Java or even Python. Some of the best comments we've gotten is when we've shown people eve code and told them to ignore the symbols, just read the words. Their eyes really open up and they tell us pretty exactly what the block is doing. No, it…
Fair enough, but I thought an earlier goal of Eve was to bring programming to non-programmers? Did that change as Eve evolved, or am I just mis-remembering?
It is, but it's a multi-step process. :) Checkout the three milestones at the bottom of the post: http://programming.witheve.com/#justataste
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess if you approach it as a "programming language" it's odd. I understood nothing of the syntax nor the semantics. But you have to admit that the way it relates different dimensions of a "program" is much more approachable than any IDE out there, in a way that is more "humane" I guess.
In what way is this more "humane"? Programming languages by design are for human consumption. In what way is this "special" or "designed" for them?
Here, I think you are wrong. I strongly suspect that while the high-level features of programming languages are chosen for human consumption, the implementation details and tooling are often chosen arbitrarily, or for machine-convenience. For example, I don't generally consider language environments where the leading white space on a line matters, or languages where trailing white space matters to be "designed for humans." Computers might be good at counting spaces, but we're mediocre at visually estimating the width of a blank area in text. Such an environment asks the user to develop more machine-like skills rather than attempting to accommodate their weaknesses.
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#227I 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…
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 think you're on the right track when you said "thoughts in a precise fashion"
Humans don't think in a precise fashion. And that's why I think pattern-matching with "give examples and hope for the best" is a way forward.
Think about how we program. We are given requirements and we noodle about it for a bit and start writing some code that is nowhere close to what the final source will be.
When I think about pattern-matching within the context of Eve, I think of automating the way us, as humans, go about our programming. We have some idea of what we want to do, and typically we need to google stuff for APIs and examples. Let's automate that to a certain extent. Let's use the machine learning advances that have happened in the past decade to automate much of the "research" that we all do when we program.
As a programmer, I'm still surprised how luddite-like we are when it comes to our tools. Many of us still are still in the "programming language + text editor" = "programming".
But most of us use tools to help use look for definitions, to do refactoring, to explore our code base. We need to take that to the next level, where some fuzzy logic is used by our programming systems to say "yeah, I think I know what you mean, are any of these examples close to what you're getting at?"
I think it's all about the tooling these days. We need much more advanced tooling to help us out.
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#228"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.
Emacs vs Vim in an unrelated thread, obligatory on HN :) // I concur
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#229Earlier 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?
Good software can be written with bad code.
Python is just "ugly" C underneath, containing for example a 1500 line switch statement, but this does not in any way change the fact that it's a great piece of software.
Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 someon…
You didn't solve the OPs problem, you just moved it around. In his case, his algo said X, and his code did Y.. very easy to see the mistake. In your case, lets add a comment // Note: PCI-DSS requirements apply below Now 3 years later, the law changes and the requirements do not apply. So you are at the same situation. Code does X, comments say Y. Which is right? Not a very easy to keep comments and code in sync
I'm fairly sure he was attempting to agree with the OPs problem.