Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought it was still on going? It’s still listed on YCR.
I'm also surprised at this. Did they all move over to dynamicland?
They all moved over to find the next adventure.
The Eve programming language project is winding down
171–180 of 270 posts
Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down
#172We 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.
>We need to have a conversation about the possible paths to make programming more widely accessible I assume that means you think that programming is not accessible enough as it is? Why do you think that? As far as engineering disciplines are concerned I consider software engineering one of the most accessible to complete newcomers. All you need is a computer, something that's not very hard to procure these days (at…
As a self taught programmer, my question to you is "Can you solve the problem space problem?" Do you understand the difference between problem space and solution space?
I know of many excellent programmers, yet they have problems solving problem space problems. They write great code, but the code is not solving a real world problem.
Many of the available programming languages (especially in the highly popular languages, like C, C++, Python, C#, etc) have too many "gotchas". Any language which has "undefined behaviour" or "implementation defined behaviour" makes itself a language for the "elites" and instead of being an adequate tool for solving problems, becomes instead a tool for elitism.
Programming languages should be a tool for specifying a solution to a problem that communicates to those who follow in the support roles (including the original author) as well as fully defining the behaviour that a senseless machine will follow.
The complexity of a solution should be predicated on the complexity of the problem and not on the "features" of the programming language involved. This is one of the reasons that I enjoy programming in Icon/Unicon, Failure is an option and allows simpler ways of saying things. The language is in no way perfect, but I find it so much better for solving the problem at hand than having to fight another language because of its "gotchas" that end up getting in the road of solving my actual problem.
Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a side note, and as someone else working in this space, you do yourself a disservice by telling yourself work in this space is stagnant since SmallTalk. It’s not that programming ergonomics are stagnant, it’s that all of the gains have been made by professionals. And the tooling is nearly impossible to leverage for a beginner environment because all of the assumptions of a pro developer are built in to their desig…
None of those are interesting experiences beyond the command line. They represent exactly the stagnant thinking that we are fighting against. Especially GIT, it could have come out in the 70s with the interface it relies on. It makes me sad that people see this as progress. It doesn’t take a rockstar to make progress here, and anyways, I’ve been relatively successful on the academic side (e.g. just got a 10 year infl…
Interesting experiences beyond the command line are game development tools; Each iteration try to make the barrier between artists/content creators and programmers thinner.
Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [...] 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?
Light table/eve was one of the influences for swift
The only quote I can find about swift and Light Table is this:
> The Xcode Playgrounds feature and REPL were a personal passion of mine, to make programming more interactive and approachable. The Xcode and LLDB teams have done a phenomenal job turning crazy ideas into something truly great. Playgrounds were heavily influenced by Bret Victor's ideas, by Light Table and by many other interactive systems.
From: http://nondot.org/sabre/
And that just mentions "Playgrounds", which seems to be some sort of editor application written in Swift. It did not inspire Swift itself.
And also, Swift hardly "changed the whole industry", as far as I know.
Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down
#175If you're interested in some other recent attempts at new approach to programming, I'd personally suggest having a look at:
that had a first public (beta) release just this month.
(I'm not associated, just personally have a strong belief that it is a breakthrough technology.)
Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Light table/eve was one of the influences for swift
The only quote I can find about swift and Light Table is this: > The Xcode Playgrounds feature and REPL were a personal passion of mine, to make programming more interactive and approachable. The Xcode and LLDB teams have done a phenomenal job turning crazy ideas into something truly great. Playgrounds were heavily influenced by Bret Victor's ideas, by Light Table and by many other interactive systems. From: http://n…
Yeah your right. Swift didn’t change anything
Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just curious what's the general space that Eve is in? Programming environments for non-programmers? I applaud the ambitious efforts of both Eve and Light Table -- it's definitely worth trying, and the negative result is valuable too. But part of me wonders if they were tackling too big a problem, or at least MARKETING a (potential) solution to too big a problem. IIRC, I believe they figured out through talking to use…
> . How many people in the world have the IQ to write a program of say 100 lines that does something useful? Have the IQ necessary? Probably 90-95%. Have the training? Significantly lower. The training required consists of both being taught a language/medium to express thought it, and being taught a structured cause and event method of thinking. There's this incredibly pervasive view in a lot of areas that programmin…
> Have the training? Significantly lower.
And the majority of people are not autodidacts so they need somebody to teach them.
The business side of our department are heavy Excel users and yet only a few can use Macros/VB properly and those people are in huge demand.
Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if programming is just hard?
> What if programming is just hard? It's not. I remember learning to program in Logo on a Commodore 64 when I was in the third grade. Even back then, I was decomposing my code into functions, playing around with recursion, etc. 30 years later, I was presenting to my son's 4th grade class, and was getting reasonable questions on CSS, github, etc. The basic concepts behind programming just aren't that hard if they're a…
I disagree, programming is hard from the perspective of understanding the problems that are needed to be solved.
I agree, programming is easy, if the language allows you to formulate code that is logical and doesn't bite you because of "undefined behaviours" or "implementation defined behaviours".
Logo was and is useful in providing you with specific conceptual patterns for writing code, but does not give the necessary abilities to provide solutions to problems via code.
One can learn the features of Calculus and how to solve Calculus problems. but it is a different matter to learn how to use it as a tool to solve real world problems. This is a different subject altogether. In my undergraduate days, oh so many decades ago, a common refrain from us engineering undergraduates was how often we would be taught something with no reference to how to use that tool for real world problems.
As the years have passed by, I have been pleased to see that in some areas, this disconnect between learning a tool and using that tool for solving real world problems has strongly diminished. There is some excellent material now available that goes a long way to solving this problem. Kudos to those men and women who teach these courses.
Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's comparing writing longhand to using Microsoft Word. The latter helps, but doesn't make writing novels fundamentally easier; in the same way, an IDE doesn't make programming fundamentally easier.
If by "fundamentally" you mean "devoid of any practicalities that may affect the actual task of doing it", I agree. However, there may ''also'' exist tools that help in the fundamental task. In the example of writing a novel, professional writers use spreadsheets that help them keep track of the general picture, and follow the details of each character, scene and plotline. It doesn't help with the task of being creat…
Yes. Programming obviously has such tools too, and in both cases their ultimate goal is to help you with all complexity that's incidental to the core of the work you're doing. Sometimes the overall reduction in complexity will allow you, as Bret Victor puts it, to "think new thoughts" - but in the end, you eventually hit the core of essential complexity of the task, and you can't be more accessible than that.
What you can do, though, is cheat with the scope. Not all writing is novels, and not all programming is large distributed systems. Writing a semi-structured limerick, or a half-assed bash script, is much easier. Ultimately, I feel that the goal of programming literacy should be to let people use computation to solve their own specific problem. That is much simpler than general programming. For instance, plenty of people program in Excel. Or in Tasker (an Android automation app). There is lots of uncharted space in designing better interfaces and paradigms for such small-scale programming (unfortunately, this goes completely against modern UI/UX "wisdom", that is all about removing user's agency from the equation).
Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down
#180Earlier 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.
In the 80's, you would turn on your C-64 or ZX-Spectrum or Oric-1 or Dragon-32 or Atari 800, and type: PRINT "This is nice" and it would. Then, you would type: 10 FOR I=1 TO 10 20 PRINT "This works too! Number ",I 30 NEXT I 40 GOTO 10 And it would. Today, you go to your computer and ... open an IDE, define a project, pick your Java environment, select "file new", write some random incantation of "public static void m…
It's not that bad. I turn on my computer and type:
echo "This is nice."
Then, I type:
for i in {1..10}; do
echo "This works too! Number $i"
done