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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

#131

Post by exikyut »

pjmlp wrote: post #111
linkmotif wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What helped me to learn programming as a 10 year old child, was the 80's programming books targeted at children. Always full of drawings, or little stories, and along the process I got introduced to BASIC, Z80 Assembly and all the intricacies of Spectrum hardware. I used to think those books were gone, but they seem to have come back regarding Arduino and Rasperry Pi programming. Just focusing on Python and Scratch n…

The massive problem is, learning Z80 assembly for the Spectrum was tricky, but not overwhelmingly so.

The C64, the Spectrum, the TRS-80, etc, were all "small" machines that were simple to learn.

The Arduino, Raspberry Pi and Scratch are also tricky, but not overwhelmingly so, and simple to learn.

The absolutely massive difference with the environments of the 80/early 90s and today is that

a) The environments learned are heavily sandboxed, caricaturized facsimiles of computing

and

b) Learning Scratch won't lay down a mental model you can immediately apply to Python, and learning Python won't lay down a mental model you can immediately apply to C++, Rust, etc.

Learning assembly language didn't quite leave you with an immediately-usable understanding of C, but what it did do is give you a working knowledge of what everything else was based on under the hood. I'd argue that's an even more valuable gift: the knowledge that you understand what the more complex environment is based on - good for confidence - and the knowledge that if you absolutely need to, you can pull everything to bits and unravel bits of it - which immensely helps with discovery.

Nowadays, it's like worst-case simulated annealing. "Climb Mt Everest, then climb all the way back down to climb Mt Everest²."

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#132

Post by exikyut »

Tom4hawk wrote: post #129
root_axis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this is much bigger problem: > because my teacher was incapable of explaining it

Education is broken, and not "impulse-fixable", ie it will require years of collective concerted effort to affect change, if it is ever fixed at all.

"A dad who knows ____ and can teach it" is, on the other hand, a practically-attainable real-world solution.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#133

Post by exikyut »

marssaxman wrote: post #90
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.

Programming is much much easier now than it was in the 80s! It's been years since I actually had to write any code myself - computers do it all for us now. Amazing things, these "compiler" programs.

That's a very interesting way of looking at it. I always kind of looked at my preferred language's grammar as "code", but now I feel like I'm calling TLS SSL when I do that.

I wonder what else to call it. "Source code" is obvious and what everyone uses, but now I want something else to use.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#134

Post by stevekemp »

pjmlp wrote: post #111
linkmotif wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What helped me to learn programming as a 10 year old child, was the 80's programming books targeted at children. Always full of drawings, or little stories, and along the process I got introduced to BASIC, Z80 Assembly and all the intricacies of Spectrum hardware. I used to think those books were gone, but they seem to have come back regarding Arduino and Rasperry Pi programming. Just focusing on Python and Scratch n…

Scroll down to the bottom of this page:

https://usborne.com/browse-books/features/computer-and-codin...

Just seeing those covers gave me a huge nostalgia-trip, from my own time programming the ZX Spectrum in the 80s. (First in BASIC, then in Z80 assembly via the fine manual.)

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#135

Post by flukus »

netheril96 wrote: post #127
flukus wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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. What exactly do you mean by this? I can think of many things that fit this description but none that don't have good reasons to exist or remain.

Webpack config?

Correct me if I'm wrong because I'm not familiar with it. But isn't that a way to declare dependencies and share the information with other developers? That's something that has a good reason to exist. Replacing that functionality would involve a way more complicated solution to the same problem.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#136

Post by adwn »

zubairq wrote: post #123
adwn wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as they changed the whole industry Huh? What industry are you talking about? The software development industry? Their influence was not even a rounding error. The let's-rethink-programming-completely industry? No idea, but that's not really an industry.

They influenced swift and a whole bunch of other interactive IDEs with the research they did. Don’t use iPhone or Android if you don’t want to use these new languages

> [...] if you don’t want to use these new languages

I'm stumped – where is that suddenly coming from now? When did I say anything about not wanting to use Swift?

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#137

Post by exDM69 »

dagw wrote: post #130
marssaxman wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming is much much easier now than it was in the 80s! It's been years since I actually had to write any code myself - computers do it all for us now. Amazing things, these "compiler" programs.

Programming is much much easier now than it was in the 80s! Certainly true in many respects. However I don't think learning programming is much easier now than it was in the 80s.

I disagree, now we have tons of free internet resources available.

Back then I had to bicycle to the library to borrow a book, and hope that the accompanying diskette with the compiler in it was still working.

Programming is still programming. Maybe becoming a professional software engineer is harder, though.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#138

Post by coldtea »

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…

>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.

Surely the concept of outliers, survivorship bias, and statistical noise is easy too then!

>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.

So, how do we produce millions of capable teachers (as opposed to the non-capable current bunch), with extra patience, and each dedicated to one or a tiny group of students?

Because this is not about how subject X is easy, but about how subject X can be made easy (or easier) under ideal conditions.

And even then, only if we assume you were a typical student, and not especially gifted or motivated.

>Programming is no different. We need to stop infantalizing people. Most humans are incredibly capable.

What if the problem is not how to teach motivated people under ideal conditions, but how to motivate or even how to teach unmotivated people, under all kinds of conditions (e.g. working class family, problematic household, poor school district, etc).

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#139

Post by HolyHaddock »

exikyut wrote: post #132
Tom4hawk wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is much bigger problem: > because my teacher was incapable of explaining it

Education is broken, and not "impulse-fixable", ie it will require years of collective concerted effort to affect change, if it is ever fixed at all. "A dad who knows ____ and can teach it" is, on the other hand, a practically-attainable real-world solution.

> a practically-attainable real-world solution.

I can't be understanding this correctly. Please expand, I fear otherwise this is going to be at the back of my mind all day.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#140

Post by lloeki »

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…

> Today unfortunately we have a culture of “you can’t, it’s hard, it’s not for you, other people do that.”

"The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

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