Live data from Hacker News

How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

hackernoon.com

31–40 of 109 posts

Re: How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

#31
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Can Eve modify CPU microcode without any overhead? If it can't, then "your entire programming stack" is excluding a lot of stuff I can't be bothered to enumerate. Also relevant: "To bake an apple pie from scratch, first one must blah blah universe blah" -- Sagan "Entire stack" is relative to the interests of the audience, not a description of the entire dependency chain. If you're claiming that YOU go around modifyin…

> I do think that their linguistic use of "unifies your entire programming stack" is entirely justified, in context.

To be clear, the author of this story isn't affiliated with Eve in an official capacity, just one of our early users :)

Although we would like Eve to replace all sorts of stacks, we'll leave it to our users to implement Eve where it's appropriate. What's nice about Eve is that you can use it for as much or as little as your project requires. Eve could strictly be the datastore layer or the frontend layer or the glue layer. Or all three. We want Eve to be flexible, that way it can fit into a project where it makes sense.

Re: How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

#34

I feel like reconciling the divide between the client/server relationship is the next major opportunity for abstraction

Eve helps do that - not in the current version (0.2), but soon your application will be able to interface with a remote server the same way it interfaces with its in-memory data and functions.

Re: How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Fine, but why without overhead? You're not addressing that. Why can't it unify the stack while making things slightly less efficient? It's not as though all of the things we need to do as programmers are constrained by computation resources.

Re: How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

#36
post #3
post #2

Yeah until I really see some practical applications written in Eve I don't think I'm ever going to really get it. It's nothing against Eve, it might be great, but nothing I've seen about it so far as really captured my imagination and I'm wondering if I'm just missing something.

[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…

[deleted]

Re: How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

#37

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…

Not sure why I was flagged. Any ideas? Seems excessively narrow minded on the part of those who did the flagging.

Anyways... I see there is a tier missing between the consumer of such model and Eve. That tier is of the Assemblers (a light version of the traditional "Developer") who will take requirements to modify an Eve app to the liking of the given consumer. They (the Assembler)( could also put out different versions of the app that fit the most requested use cases.

I think the thing that the Eve developers are missing (from their mental model) is that the "essential complexity" of a given task is irreducible and is often more than someone who is not an algorithmic thinker can handle. This is different than the "incidental complexity" which Eve might reduce greatly.

Re: How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

#38
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.

Do you think that, generally, if someone needs an app to do something they've just thought of, that there should exist some way for them to build it themselves? If not, why not?

We will know the age of "personal computing" has truly arrived when such things are possible. At the moment, our hypothetical food truck owner (and many, many more people I know personally) are at the mercy of others, frustrated and unable to achieve their computing goals unaided.

Re: How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

#39
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.

My startup Velox.io ( https://velox.io , which is looking to go live in the next couple of months) is working on the same issue. Right now writing code is overly verbose (and often brittle). The author does make some good points around unifying API, Database and Application code. Most code is centred about moving data from A-B, with some logic applied to it. Eve done some interesting stuff, as has Linq from .net, AWS…

> People have been trying to make programming easier/ accessible since the days of Hypercard, but no one has really cracked yet.

There is no shortage of good programming languages and useful paradigms. The problem is how to interface with existing systems written in a different language with a very different mindset (e.g. your operating system). Someone has to write code to bridge those abstractions, and that only happens if enough resources are concentrated at the right place.

Re: How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

#40
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.

My startup Velox.io ( https://velox.io , which is looking to go live in the next couple of months) is working on the same issue. Right now writing code is overly verbose (and often brittle). The author does make some good points around unifying API, Database and Application code. Most code is centred about moving data from A-B, with some logic applied to it. Eve done some interesting stuff, as has Linq from .net, AWS…

> yet most people are capable of creating spreadsheets (and writing formulas)

Not in my experience.

Post reply on HN