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The Eve programming language project is winding down

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Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#101

Post by anewhnaccount2 »

paulhodge wrote: post #72
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #41

While Eve is an interesting problem, the main issues that makes programming hard are the same thing that makes law hard: 1) Specifying something in an unambiguous way. 2) Knowing what assumptions you are making. 3) Anticipating contingencies. Read a contract or the tax code. Even though they are using English (in the US), it requires an advanced degree to be able to craft such legal documents well. It is the same thi…

Yeah, people talk about necessary complexity vs unnecessary complexity. "Unnecessary complexity" is all those arcane coding rituals that we do, that our users don't know or care about, but we have to do because our current tools demand it. We can't get rid of necessary complexity and so we probably can't design a programming interface for someone that is completely illiterate in math & logic. But what we can do is 1)…

Hence the name of the Eve blog, http://incidentalcomplexity.com/

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#102

Post by seanmcdirmid »

didibus wrote: post #93
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which right now is mostly going to the deep learning train :(. There are some academics working in this area right now, Ravi Chugh, Phillip Guo, to name a couple.

Isn't generalized AI and even more ambitious long term goal though? Why program anything, just tell the computer what you want and he'll make it for you.

That's funny, since Engelbart's work in the mother of all demos was seen as irrelevant by much of the CS community at the time because they thought generalized AI was just around the corner! After a 2 or 3 AI winters, they changed their minds.

Generalized AI is like practical fusion, always 20 years away. I mean, it will come eventually, but until then...there is still value in making humans better.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#103

Post by indubitable »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #41

While Eve is an interesting problem, the main issues that makes programming hard are the same thing that makes law hard: 1) Specifying something in an unambiguous way. 2) Knowing what assumptions you are making. 3) Anticipating contingencies. Read a contract or the tax code. Even though they are using English (in the US), it requires an advanced degree to be able to craft such legal documents well. It is the same thi…

Another good example of the issue here is any programming language that was meant to be able to be read/used by non programmers. SQL is a great example there in my opinion. The syntax and structure is clearly meant to try to mimic relatively natural language, yet in practice I think SQL is vastly more challenging and complex than most any programming language intended to be used by programmers.

Of course this goes all the way back to all the programming language that used to be used around the time of SQL's development, such as things like COBOL. They're just really tough to work with, even for those of us who learned it as one of our first languages. Anecdotally at least C structure languages now feel 'natural' to me, whereas the natural language programming languages always felt (and feel) like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#104

Post by thinkpad20 »

cmontella wrote: post #38
jonathanedwards wrote: post #32

We need to have a conversation about the possible paths to make programming more widely accessible. Chris saw the problem clearly and tried to fix it. Respect. I am most impressed with the number of iterations he was able to crank in the context of a startup. But ultimately a startup may not be the best place to start, because low-end programming is not a short-term growth play. We have to play the long game.

> because low-end programming is not a short-term growth play. We have to play the long game. This is true, and one of the reasons we opted to look at the acquisition route rather than raising another round; with raising another round, a whole lot of expectations would be attached to that surrounding growth, while we were still operating heavily in a research capacity. Languages like Rust and Go that have nice corpor…

> It's hard to pitch a greenfield project like Eve, because there's no real great way to quantify the benefits of a language before it's been fully realized.

Plenty of languages have been developed without major corporate backing (especially in the beginning). Off the top of my head, elm, elixir, Haskell, ML, ruby, python, coffeescript, purescript, Idris, Agda, pony and I’m sure many others were developed at least initially by hobbyists and/or academics.

I honestly don’t know a whole lot about Eve. Maybe it was too large in scope to be a side project or fully volunteer-driven. But, even if that’s the case, that’s one of the main things academia is for; perhaps Chris should go for a PhD instead of a startup. I’m sure there are plenty of schools which would give him ample time and resources to work on it for research.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#105

Post by zubairq »

As an Angel investor on the Eve project even though I lost my investment, I think that Chris, Robert and the whole team deserve recognition as they changed the whole industry, and now everyone is following them. I am proud to have had the chance to be involved with them!

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#106

Post by linkmotif »

jonathanedwards wrote: post #32

We need to have a conversation about the possible paths to make programming more widely accessible. Chris saw the problem clearly and tried to fix it. Respect. I am most impressed with the number of iterations he was able to crank in the context of a startup. But ultimately a startup may not be the best place to start, because low-end programming is not a short-term growth play. We have to play the long game.

I think the conversation we should have is why we make everything seem so hard. What a bunch of hooey.

In 5th grade everyone talked about how Algebra was hard. When I got to Algebra, it was pretty easy. I was very surprised! Of course my dad had to explain it to me, because my teacher was incapable of explaining it.

10th grade, same thing with calculus. Thank god my dad knew calculus and was patient. Because my teacher did not.

And so on and so on.

One thing I’ve noticed is that nothing humans have invented or discovered is hard. Learning things requires curiosity, a lot of patience, and someone showing you how to get from A to B in small steps. Overwhelmingly, the inventors and discoverers are the people at the bleeding edge of those small steps who find a next step.

Programming is no different. We need to stop infantalizing people. Most humans are incredibly capable. We don’t need programming languages for children. A child can learn Python or JavaScript. You just have to show them that it’s cool. But instead most adults show kids that sports, video games and Netflix are cool. So, c’est la vie.

Today unfortunately we have a culture of “you can’t, it’s hard, it’s not for you, other people do that.” People always refer to “they” when they’re taking about people inventing something. This is good for the rich and easy for the poor. Who is “they”? What if instead of “they” it was “we”?

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#107

Post by lazyasciiart »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #74
azhenley wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graduate school is a great place for "people testing the fringes." My experimental code editor design, Patchworks [1], is one such example. P.S. I'm a big fan of your work! Looking forward to hearing about your next project. [1] http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N84177

> Graduate school is a great place for "people testing the fringes." Testing, yes, but not exploring. Grad school gives you one experiment and then you have to start publishing. So if you have something you want to try out, with a direct implementation strategy and a clear set of possible outcomes, then you can do that at grad school. If you want to try many things and iterate, grad school will not work well. You wil…

Isn't the freedom from short term value basically the concept behind tenure?

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#108

Post by indubitable »

jonathanedwards wrote: post #32

We need to have a conversation about the possible paths to make programming more widely accessible. Chris saw the problem clearly and tried to fix it. Respect. I am most impressed with the number of iterations he was able to crank in the context of a startup. But ultimately a startup may not be the best place to start, because low-end programming is not a short-term growth play. We have to play the long game.

I'm unsure programming can be made accessible, and there's a very specific reason for this.

Simplifying the medium of something (in other words making it so somebody could genuinely learn a programming language, from nothing, in 5 minutes) does not necessarily make task implementation any easier. Consider writing. It's something that anybody of mean intelligence is more than capable of. And writing a novel requires nothing technically more than just writing, yet somehow there is this entirely different skill set there that is not really learned and one that many people for whatever reason seem incapable of developing.

Even if I could get 24/7 attention from Dostoyevsky, Stephen King, and George R.R. Martin for years on end - I'm not going to be a strong novelist. This could be genetic issues, but even if we want to discount that (which is not really a reasonable thing to do) - my potential would certainly be killed off my by my interest. I simply don't get pleasure from writing.

Programming is very much the same thing. Even if you make the 'human interface' to programming as trivial as possible, you've barely scratched the surface of actually creating desirable things. And unless you get pleasure from this creation and have this sort of 'feel' for doing as such, it's going to be a low involvement grind with a mediocre final product.

I think the thing we're fooled by is the confounding issue that programming languages are not easy. And so it's easy to think that if we just make the languages easy, that programming would thus be easy. But I see absolutely no reason to think that this is where the 'real' barrier to entry is. Making a tool easy, does not make the task that tool is used for easy.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#109

Post by indubitable »

tenken wrote: post #73
rntz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building bridges is hard. But it's a lot easier now than it was five hundred years ago. There's no general reason to think hard things can't get easier.

Sure there is, that's why mastering a concept is hard and takes thousands of repatitions or hours to become masterful. Similarly not simply building the same old bridge, because who the hell wants bridge 1.0 I want warp-bridge 20.0 now, requires I have a mastery of basic Bridges and additional pioneering topics currently of interest of which few individuals are experts.

I think this is a really great point. Many people always dreamed of making games and now a days there are make-a-game kits that enable people to do just that with almost no programming knowledge necessary. But now the sort of games capable of being made by such things are relics of the past. By the time you create tools capable of enabling anybody to do 'average' tasks at one time, those tasks end up being relegated to triviality with the net effect that you're basically treading water.

And similarly the explosive growth of the products of these make-a-game kits renders the skill almost entirely worthless. What would have been a very viable publishable product 25 years ago, is now considered shovelware. I think the only way this would end is if we somehow reached a skill cap in development (you've officially made the best bridge that's at all possible!), but if such a thing may exist we're certainly nowhere even remotely close to getting there.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#110

Post by root_axis »

linkmotif wrote: post #106
jonathanedwards wrote: post #32

We need to have a conversation about the possible paths to make programming more widely accessible. Chris saw the problem clearly and tried to fix it. Respect. I am most impressed with the number of iterations he was able to crank in the context of a startup. But ultimately a startup may not be the best place to start, because low-end programming is not a short-term growth play. We have to play the long game.

I think the conversation we should have is why we make everything seem so hard. What a bunch of hooey. In 5th grade everyone talked about how Algebra was hard. When I got to Algebra, it was pretty easy. I was very surprised! Of course my dad had to explain it to me, because my teacher was incapable of explaining it. 10th grade, same thing with calculus. Thank god my dad knew calculus and was patient. Because my teach…

Well, not everyone has the benefits of an educated parent who takes time out of their day to tutor their kids through calculus. Maybe "everything seem so hard" to people without those kinds of advantages.
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