Eve: Programming designed for humans

Post by lisper » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 8:52 PM UTC

cmontella wrote: post #180

noonespecial wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by asolove » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 8:57 PM UTC

noonespecial wrote: post #211

asolove wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to conflate "allowing ambiguity" with "not requiring specification of extraneous detail." It is not a new mistake. Many people thought that programming with GC, or with high-level languages, or with generics, was just a kind of magic that couldn't lead to understandable programs. But these things succeed because, while they allow you to stop worrying about certain details, they do so while still remaining pe…

I'd say that the details still exist but they've been handled with a very powerful idea which is sane defaults triumphing over endless required specification. In most cases you still can reach the minutia, you just usually don't need to. There's a difference between producing unambiguous behavior given a specific input and making it easy to create that input in the first place. I'm with you along the lines of embeddi…

Post by primitivesuave » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 8:58 PM UTC

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…

Post by tempodox » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 9:07 PM UTC

oldmanjay wrote: post #97

mkozlows wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not revolutionary at all. You can do that already with tons of environments. Here's one for Javascript, based on Markdown: https://github.com/jostylr/litpro

Did someone make a rule that everything needs to be a revolution?

Post by FrancoDiaz » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 9:21 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #144

mkozlows wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 someon…