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Eve: Programming designed for humans

programming.witheve.com

371–380 of 401 posts

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#371

Earlier 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. 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'r…

>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. That is not how one writes software...

OTOH, it is how one prototypes software. "Build one to throw away" is totally a thing.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#372
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A state transfer diagram would probably be more useful as a view on the code (similar to how the Smalltalk browser is a simple graphical representation/layout of code. Or indeed any IDE with advanced code folding (show me the class name and public methods only). But there's ways to mix the two: Python doctests is one. The lp approach is to "escape" the code, not the comments. I really do think some richer data struct…

I personally only see the utility of the notebook as a demonstration tool of a finished product. Kinda goes to your comment on the notebooks and code maintenance. It's a good teaching or presentation tool but not (IMO) a development tool.

The main question is if there's any fundamental reason for why we can't have both: a rich, versioned, distributed data store for our logic and data - and a number of views that allow us to inspect and modify it.

The best example I'm aware of is probably Smalltalk coupled with monticello version control and a solid object database like gemstone/s (I'm not aware of a real open/free workalike for the last part).

That's not not say relational or logic databases aren't useful - but it's more difficult to manage the data, query code and program code in one integrated system if the database takes the form of an external server. That said, Ms visual studio and the SQL db gui does a pretty good job of presenting a somewhat coherent environment.

I used to be strongly in the Linux/Unix camp - thinking that the datastore we call the filsystem is a good abstraction. But I've come to believe that even the strong legacy of user familiarity isn't a good enough reason to stick with it. Even if we were a little bit more serious and at least went all plan9 - rather than the half-hearted state of Linux/Unix (everything is a file, or a database file, or a binary file or an archive of a filsystem or...).

That said a "filsystem" might very well still be a decent building block for a higher level system (with decent search, for example).

But yeah, I don't think jupyter is the be all, end all of development. But it is an interesting way to move legacy programming environments forward in a low friction manner.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#373
post #331
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hu…

Or it asks the user to use tabs? Or an editor that inserts spaces when you press tab? Indentation has never been a stumbling block for anyone but the most junior of programmers.

Sure, there are all sorts of ways to lessen the pain of syntactically significant indentation. Indeed, I'd say that the annoyance can be made sufficiently small that by the time someone is an experienced enough coder to recognize that the pain has always been communally self-inflicted, they're too used to it to care.

Do also note that I'm not saying that indentation is by itself bad.

http://1060nm.com/42/en/

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, basically COBOL, which supposedly was a pogramming language so easy to use that managers could code the problems themselves without those pesky programmers that slow everything down all the time.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#375
post #146

While this is a very early version, something like it will eventually put most programmers out of work. Probably it'll be another language/tool and it won't be very soon, but at some point writing trivial software will actually be trivial. It's ironic, being a programmer that automates things that people used to do manually, and kind of doing good but leaving someone unemployed. How fitting it will be to suddenly bec…

If we create an AI that can write software, no one in any profession will ever need to work again. So far all this has shown is it can places buttons on a form. Try building a path finding algorithm with it, that is actually performant enough to run inside a 60fps game engine across open terrain, and I think you'll find C++ isn't going anywhere yet.

Probably except the world's oldest profession

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#376
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally only see the utility of the notebook as a demonstration tool of a finished product. Kinda goes to your comment on the notebooks and code maintenance. It's a good teaching or presentation tool but not (IMO) a development tool.

The main question is if there's any fundamental reason for why we can't have both: a rich, versioned, distributed data store for our logic and data - and a number of views that allow us to inspect and modify it. The best example I'm aware of is probably Smalltalk coupled with monticello version control and a solid object database like gemstone/s (I'm not aware of a real open/free workalike for the last part). That's…

For the OODB, perhaps Squeak's Magma? http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2665

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#377

> Sorry, but what about this is "designed for humans"? In the mind of the author it probably means 'Designed for reasonable humans and not those dirty nerds who write Haskell and shit.' Edit: Jesus, why the fuck is everyone getting triggered over this? HN has the most sensitive snowflakes out of any discussion forum.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12817789 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#378
post #290
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The 'story-like' literate programming is the direction in which programming will (should) move in the future imho." Check out Inform 7, too.

I've tried to get into Inform 7, but I spend more time trying to finesse the natural-ish language around to get it to do what I want it to do, compared to the more archaic, C-like Inform 6.

The idea is basically to make the code easy to read despite being hard to write, which might not be what you want.

I find it a really beautiful system that's super fun to work with. And showing ordinary people the code is great!

These days I'm working on a kind of interactive documentary about the collective house where I live and the environment around it. Mini games for the renovations and firewood gathering and stuff, mazes for the nearby central market and the home improvement department store, and various random stories that happened here. It's really fun!

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#379
I absolutely loved the semantic wiki stuff that was shown towards the end of the "In search of tomorrow" video. This seems fairly different to that system. Is there a write up/talk about why you changed? Is there anything like that semantic wiki thing available for me to use?

https://youtu.be/VZQoAKJPbh8?t=46m20s

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#380

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…

...So, literate Smalltalk. Or literate Lisp.
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