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Eve: Programming designed for humans

programming.witheve.com

261–270 of 401 posts

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#261

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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…

so basically Java?

Good tooling, easy to understand, unambiguous? Sounds like Java.

Why can't people just use Java?

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#262

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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 would say that GC, generics, and maybe even HLLs are useful because they are tools to constrain the set of possible states the program can possibly enter. When your language and runtime provide good tooling for constraining the state space, then that allows you to elide specification of those extraneous details. E.g., some form of GC is a basic runtime requirement for most of the HLLs today. They could almost not e…

Absolutely agree. Similarly, I think we are finding that if you want to program reasonably on distributed hardware or over state spaces too large to hold in memory, you need a programming environment that constrains your ability to specify that things happen in sequential order, or to specify details about how you listen for events or get access to data directly.

Eve may not turn out to be the right abstraction away from details. But the parent comment complaining about the details it takes away from the programmer is probably on the wrong side of history.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#263

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> But spreadsheets were probably the last quantum leap in the field. > We're overdue for another. I'm working on it, and do think I have a solution. Unlike Eve, for example, you can (and we do) create (almost said "write", but there's no textual code) an OS kernel in it. And it's nothing like the approach Eve is taking, which I consider to be nothing like why spreadsheets were (and are) successful. To me, Eve is noth…

I tend to agree that Eve isn't quite the right direction. The REPL is important, so that's good. And one-click deployment, one-click forking of development environment, those things are critically important. But from there... I agree the high-level stdlib is a problem. I think what we need is an easy-to-dip-your-toes-into environment that provides a path down into "real programming" and ideally down to metal. I think…

I agree with you that APIs are where things fail, and without a good solution for that, you're not going to make much progress. I've spent a ridiculous amount of time working on that problem (and do believe I have a solution).

I'll be sure to post to HN when my visual programming environment is ready to use.

Today is Eve's day. :)

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#264

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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…

I was initially confused by the "human" line too, but once I looked at the video and the examples I understood what you guys are trying to do.

There are a lot of really interesting approaches there. I really like the ideas!

I think a lot of service devs (read: stateless) won't get it. But people who code front end and deal with business logic daily might find something to love in here.

Worth discussing if nothing else! You got my star!

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#265
post #231

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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…

> Or rendering headers in your code Sorry, you lost me right there. If you need headers, you've already run off the rails (no pun intended) IMHO.

Headers as in document headlines and literate programming not as in header files.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#267
post #265
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or rendering headers in your code Sorry, you lost me right there. If you need headers, you've already run off the rails (no pun intended) IMHO.

Headers as in document headlines and literate programming not as in header files.

Thanks for pointing that out. I was wondering why I was getting so many downvotes.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#268
post #75

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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'm also seeing an issue with no scrollbars on the tutorial. Firefox 49.0.2 Win8. Awesome stuff though, excited to see where it goes.

Same, Firefox 49.0.2 on Windows 7.

I opened the quickstart in Chrome and went all the way through without a hitch until the very end - the last code block doesn't appear to do anything. Clicking submit doesn't update the visible output, nor does it clear the form as the code shows it should.

I'm thoroughly liking the environment other than the hiccups though. I'm not familiar with datalog, but have dabbled a bit in prolog and always liked the way unification felt.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#270
I'm sorry guys, I see you made a great work. But until it goes to visual programming kind of things it will look like SQL-like language, which I like btw. But visual would be a really next step keep on with those things. And world-like document is really a great idea. Thank you.
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