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How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

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Re: How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

#11

Post by ibdknox »

ilostmykeys wrote: post #6
ibdknox wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Eve member] Out of curiosity, what would you classify as a practical application? We're looking for some interesting examples to build to help show Eve to folks. EDIT: For instance, one of the examples we're throwing together now is an app that a food truck owner could use to put up their menu, manage a queue of orders (in person and online), alert people when their order is ready, accept payments, and post to socia…

Why don't you just make that app for iOS/Android and let food truck owners download it? I know that is a useless thing to suggest given your intent but I think it's equally useless for food truck owners to want to build their own app. There must be a better range of use cases.

I probably did a poor job explaining, but that's what the example is: an app that a food truck owner could use to run their food truck. :)

> There must be a better range of use cases.

There are lots of businesses I'm sure we could build, but that's not really our goal. This one happens to be straightforward and real, so it seemed decent. Do you have any suggestions that you think would make for a better demonstration?

Re: How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

#12

Post by erikpukinskis »

ilostmykeys wrote: post #6
ibdknox wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Eve member] Out of curiosity, what would you classify as a practical application? We're looking for some interesting examples to build to help show Eve to folks. EDIT: For instance, one of the examples we're throwing together now is an app that a food truck owner could use to put up their menu, manage a queue of orders (in person and online), alert people when their order is ready, accept payments, and post to socia…

Why don't you just make that app for iOS/Android and let food truck owners download it? I know that is a useless thing to suggest given your intent but I think it's equally useless for food truck owners to want to build their own app. There must be a better range of use cases.

You were flagged but this is a great question.

I think the more useful ability for the food truck operator is the ability to modify the software their business runs on, not the ability to build it from scratch.

Imagine everything on everyone's desk was bolted to it, and you could only choose between a few desk packages. Someone comes along and says "people should be able to put together their own desk packages!" But everyone wonders: "huh? I'm not a furniture engineer. What would I do with a custom desk that I can't do with an off-the-shelf one?"

But as we know people come up with all kinds of uses for desks when they are allowed to reconfigure them freely.

That's what we're losing out on by not making software reconfigurable, at least a little bit at the top layer.

What we have right now is a series of buttons that add or remove bolted down components from your desk. Eve is trying to imagine what it might look like to actually be able to move things around freely, add duct tape etc.

I know it's a weak argument, because no one really knows what people would exactly do with the ability to modify their software. It just seems to me like the kind of thing that would pay off.

Re: How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

#14

Post by dman »

ibdknox wrote: post #11
ilostmykeys wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you just make that app for iOS/Android and let food truck owners download it? I know that is a useless thing to suggest given your intent but I think it's equally useless for food truck owners to want to build their own app. There must be a better range of use cases.

I probably did a poor job explaining, but that's what the example is: an app that a food truck owner could use to run their food truck. :) > There must be a better range of use cases. There are lots of businesses I'm sure we could build, but that's not really our goal. This one happens to be straightforward and real, so it seemed decent. Do you have any suggestions that you think would make for a better demonstration…

Analyzing logs seems like a great demo, since the app largely needs to give people the ability to work with data - so the data oriented parts of Eve should have an excellent opportunity to stand out.

Re: How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

#15

Post by Liron »

dicedog wrote: post #10

I'm excited for Eve and next-gen programming languages but as details emerge, it seems like it could easily have been a few libraries and an architecture pattern in most other functional programming languages. When I first learn about things like the continuation monad or CQRS, I have similar reinvent-the-world fantasies but it's often sufficient to expand my toolkit and change my style (in full disclojure ;-), my de…

I think your point is valid in general, but Eve's semantics are deeply rooted in Logic Programming. IMO that's a more fundamental change than what we can hope to get from layering a pattern/library/architecture on top of an existing database or programming language.

Re: How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

#16

Post by GavinMcG »

erichocean wrote: post #13

Can Eve call into C without any overhead? If it can't, then "your entire programming stack" is excluding the kernel and a lot of existing libraries/code.

Why does it need to be without overhead in order to be accurate that it unifies the entire stack?

Re: How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

#17

Post by erichocean »

GavinMcG wrote: post #16
erichocean wrote: post #13

Can Eve call into C without any overhead? If it can't, then "your entire programming stack" is excluding the kernel and a lot of existing libraries/code.

Why does it need to be without overhead in order to be accurate that it unifies the entire stack?

Because to qualify as "the entire stack", you need to be able to talk to the kernel efficiently, which in practice means: call into C without overhead.

I have no problem with what Eve is doing, but it's not "the entire stack" and with Eve's paradigm, never will be. And that's okay—just stop calling it "the entire stack".

Re: How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

#18

Post by cmontella »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #12
ilostmykeys wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you just make that app for iOS/Android and let food truck owners download it? I know that is a useless thing to suggest given your intent but I think it's equally useless for food truck owners to want to build their own app. There must be a better range of use cases.

You were flagged but this is a great question. I think the more useful ability for the food truck operator is the ability to modify the software their business runs on, not the ability to build it from scratch. Imagine everything on everyone's desk was bolted to it, and you could only choose between a few desk packages. Someone comes along and says "people should be able to put together their own desk packages!" But…

> I think the more useful ability for the food truck operator is the ability to modify the software their business runs on, not the ability to build it from scratch.

Yes, I agree with this 100%, and this is one of the main goals for Eve, much further down the line (see some of our experiments with graphical interfaces to Eve: https://github.com/witheve/eve-experiments)

But even today we're focused on making programs easier to read and modify. Let's say a food truck owner (with a little technical experience) does download our app written in Eve, and wants to modify a button.

When he opens the program, he can see a table of contents, and code written in a literate programming style. So immediately there's a place to start.

The user could read through the document and try to find the place where the button is drawn, but the program is running right there. The user can inspect the button in question, and the editor will point right to the code that draws it.

The user can modify the code right there, and see changes to the app immediately. This workflow is similar to what we demoed in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWAMr72VaaU

Obviously given the current form of Eve, this scenario requires a food truck owner who is also a developer. But supporting simple workflows that make using a computer easier is central to what we're trying to do with this language.

Re: How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

#20

Post by miguelrochefort »

skybrian wrote: post #5

The part I'm most skeptical of is Eve's universal use of set-based semantics, whether it's needed or not. It seems like making sets and single values look different in the code would be more understandable than making everything look the same. Treating them as different types might be a good way to catch errors, too. But SQL is very successful so maybe they'll do okay anyway.

This is actually the most elegant aspect of Eve.

You're always working with an abstract/fuzzy value that represents all possible values given some constraints, and only have to resolve a concrete instance when you absolutely need to. More often than not, were working with ordered sets, not single elements.

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