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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

#181

Post by a-saleh »

coldtea wrote: post #138
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…

> 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…

"and each dedicated to one or a tiny group of students?" ... I think you are onto something there. Anecdotally many of the 'survivors' that claim $subjects are easy did have 1-to-1 tutor for some parts of the journey.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#182

Post by d--b »

airstrike wrote: post #155
d--b wrote: post #118

I'm sorry to say but I am happy to see that this is coming to an end. These guys have delusions of grandeur. At best, they're good researchers looking into new and simpler programming paradigms. But the way they're talking about it is just horrific to me. It's full of "imagine a world where you could just..." and "we're building that world for you" BS. I just hope Eve's failure is going to be a lesson in humility.

That's standard startup speak, though. How else are you going to get investors and early adopters excited? Everyone is competing for everyone else's fleeting attention this day and age.

If they truly did find something amazing, then perhaps it would have been worth having investors and early adopters excited...

I'm not saying they can't be emphatic, but I much prefer a simpler to-the-point style. ObservableHQ's is a good example (in a somewhat related field).

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#183

Post by _pmf_ »

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.

> We need to have a conversation about the possible paths to make programming more widely accessible.

Why? There's no shortage of programmers. People who want to do data mangling and don't want to use "real programming" use Excel or Matlab.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#184

Post by beagle3 »

dukoid wrote: post #165
beagle3 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Would you mind taking a look at https://github.com/stefanhaustein/codechat ? WDYT?

Can't try on an Android right now, did watch the YouTube and looked at the examples.

First, it looks awesome. You should do a Show HN sooner than later.

Having a few decades of experience under my belt, I'm sure I'm blind to some things newcomers/starters would see, but what I did notice:

- Camel case is bad for mobile typing, and bad for non-coders in my experience; underscore is better for the latter but not for mobile typing, so that's not really a solution unless you can add an underscore or some other character (non-minus-dash? center-dot?) that can be pressed directly.

- Case sensitivity in general is best avoided in beginner languages, which if adopted might make the above point moot.

- I personally find the pairing of "end" and ":" confusing, possibly because of years of "begin/end", "{/}" and "indent: dedent" experience. Most people seem to have a better intuitive grasp of the indent/dedent than any other block scoping, but for mobile I guess ":/end" is acceptable although "{/}" might be better.

- What is the distinction between "let" and "variable" ?

- The "#number" syntax is not intuitive - I goess it's a replacement for function names or line numbers, for refernece purposes?

- One of the conceptual problems that some people have is with the "=" sign for assignment, as it conflicts with its use in mathematics. All overcome it sooner or later, but when I've shown APL ( where assigment of 3 to a is written A - Consider adding a variable value display. I've used PythonTutor[1] to teach basic JavaScript and Python non-programmers with great success. A complete value trace is likely beyond the scope of codechat, but a variable display might be very useful.

All in all, I think it's awesome. Are you familiar with Atari VCS 2600 BASIC[0]? That's what it reminded me of.

[0] http://boston.conman.org/2015/06/16.1 [1] http://www.pythontutor.com/

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#185

Post by lucozade »

robertkrahn01 wrote: post #168

I'm very sorry to see this. We need investment in programming language and environments – and right now there is pretty much zero of it. No, new programming concepts and tools will not pay of immediately but in the long term they can be incredible efficiency multipliers, empowering pros to do more work in less time and non-pros to be programming in the first place. As long as no one is interested in funding this kind…

> and right now there is pretty much zero of it

There's huge investment in programming languages and environments. It wouldn't surprise me if there's more than there has ever been at any one time.

And it's entirely healthy that some fail. That's a primary means of learning. I would anticipate that some of the ideas from Eve will find their way into other environments, as did ideas from LightTable before it.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#186

Post by klibertp »

airstrike wrote: post #155
d--b wrote: post #118

I'm sorry to say but I am happy to see that this is coming to an end. These guys have delusions of grandeur. At best, they're good researchers looking into new and simpler programming paradigms. But the way they're talking about it is just horrific to me. It's full of "imagine a world where you could just..." and "we're building that world for you" BS. I just hope Eve's failure is going to be a lesson in humility.

That's standard startup speak, though. How else are you going to get investors and early adopters excited? Everyone is competing for everyone else's fleeting attention this day and age.

> That's standard startup speak, though.

That's exactly the problem: building a programming language doesn't fit - I think - into the startup framework unless you're prepared to be in stealth-mode for a decade. Even the biggest tech companies have problems with making their languages mainstream - for every success-story like Go or Swift we have some kind of Dart or Dylan that simply didn't work out, despite companies investing massive resources into them.

> How else are you going to get investors and early adopters excited?

With a programming language? It's easy: have a good, battle-tested codebase which implements your killer features efficiently and correctly, supports non-primary features just as well, and has a huge collection of written (open source) software/examples in that language.

That's why I think PLs are not easy (or maybe even impossible) to make into a startup. LightTable had a much higher chance to work out, IMHO, because it was well-defined, was not without precedent and some other similar projects proved to be viable businesses (for a time).

EDIT: I forgot, the Red[1] lang team tries to do something similar, ie. write a language and be a profitable company at the same time; we'll see if they manage, but then again, they are looking to "just" displace REBOL instead of "revolutionalizing the way you think about programming" (again).

[1] http://www.red-lang.org

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#187

Post by beagle3 »

phaemon wrote: post #180
beagle3 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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." and it does. Then, I type: for i in {1..10}; do echo "This works too! Number $i" done And it does.

I appreciate this response... As you say, it's not too bad, although the {1..10} and the semicolon would be more confusing to the uninitiated (based on the fact that they are confusing to many bash veterans as well...)

Now, how do you replicate

    SAVE "myprogram"
and a later

    LOAD "myprogram"
    RUN
without having to teach vi, redirection, chmod, source, $PATH, and friends?

My point is that the old environments, while limited, scaled from zero to useful with much less requirements than today's environments, which scale much higher at the expense of a beginner's joy of experimentation.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#188

Post by Firadeoclus »

exDM69 wrote: post #137
dagw wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

An abundance of choice can actually make things harder.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#189

Post by robertkrahn01 »

lucozade wrote: post #185
robertkrahn01 wrote: post #168

I'm very sorry to see this. We need investment in programming language and environments – and right now there is pretty much zero of it. No, new programming concepts and tools will not pay of immediately but in the long term they can be incredible efficiency multipliers, empowering pros to do more work in less time and non-pros to be programming in the first place. As long as no one is interested in funding this kind…

> and right now there is pretty much zero of it There's huge investment in programming languages and environments. It wouldn't surprise me if there's more than there has ever been at any one time. And it's entirely healthy that some fail. That's a primary means of learning. I would anticipate that some of the ideas from Eve will find their way into other environments, as did ideas from LightTable before it.

Where? The state of the art today of

- debugging

- code browsing, system exploration

- customizable, modular, non-textual user interfaces*

- immediate feedback after code changes

- non-textual programming

is * not necessarily visual programming. Look at the Genera Lisp OS or Plan 9 for example.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#190

Post by adwn »

zubairq wrote: post #176
diggan wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>> And also, Swift hardly "changed the whole industry", as far as I know.

> Yeah your right. Swift didn’t change anything

This is the second time in this comment thread that you have strongly misrepresented something said by someone else. For the sake of a rational discussion, please refrain from such behavior in the future.

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