The Eve programming language project is winding down • Hacker News Board

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#201

Post by candu » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:51 PM UTC

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…

There are most certainly human inventions / discoveries that are, in some sense, "hard" (either to discover in the first place, or to explain / grasp). We have a biased view here: we can look back at, e.g., Einstein's general relativity and summarize its development as "well, he just thought to explore the logical implications of having a constant speed of light!" We have that luxury of hindsight (and several decades of steadily improving explanations of the original insight).

Then you go and start reading Actual Science: Minkowski spaces? Tensors? Paradoxes about long objects and barns? Gravitational lensing? Figuring out where to go with that initial idea is decidedly non-trivial.

In the extreme, there are papers at the bleeding edge of mathematics that can only be meaningfully reviewed by half a dozen people worldwide. Understanding these papers (or anything at the limits of species-wide knowledge) is a far cry from grasping algebra / calculus: eventually you hit a point of diminishing returns, where further advances in your understanding of the problem require months or even years of dedicated study...

...and yet (assuming we refrain from destroying ourselves) these same problems may eventually find their way into high school textbooks, where they will be succinctly (and approximately / incompletely) summarized so as to make them look easy and incremental. That's great! It means we've permanently moved the pedagogical starting point forward for future generations, so that they can go and struggle with truly hard problems that we don't even know to ask.

My point: yes, some things are hard, even if most are not. I'd say that the trick to advancing humanity lies less in convincing students that everything is easy given enough time / patience / curiosity, and more in getting them to stick with hard problems: to normalize failure, as it were. That said, I do agree that we should avoid presenting things that aren't truly hard as though they are :)

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#202

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:53 PM UTC

indubitable wrote: post #103

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 al…

> 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.

I don't; and the fact that I've known plenty of people who are not programmers before and do not consider themselves such afterward who have picked up SQL fairly quickly seems consistent with it not being that much of a barrier.

I think SQL had some design decisions that are particularly frustrating to programmers who are familiar largely with currently popular general purpose languages, though.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#203

Post by TuringTest » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:55 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #179

TuringTest wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

> 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.

There, that's where most programmers miss the picture. I'm glad that you get it, and I couldn't agree more. There's the whole discipline of End-User Development dedicated to explore that area. General programming is like general nuclear physics; not everyone ''needs'' to know the details, but everyone may benefit of plugging a device to the wall and use the power, without a "priest of electricity" who creates a six-months agile project to do the wiring for them.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#204

Post by dmitriid » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:56 PM UTC

sreaching wrote: post #163

exikyut wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

he would have learned it regardless of his dad teaching him - because he is smart. education can't do much to change the population distribution of intelligence.

"Smart" often has nothing to do with actual IQ (if it can be measured), but with opportunities and possibilities.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#205

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:57 PM UTC

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.

> These guys have delusions of grandeur.

Their communication showed only the amount of that that is typical of every start up; it may be more irritating to many technical folk because, unlike most startups, programming was the problem domain and not just a tool used in the solution, making the hyperbole more obvious than normal.

> I just hope Eve's failure is going to be a lesson in humility.

Eve's failure does nothing to change the structural factors that drive hyperbolic public messaging in the startup world.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#206

Post by dmitriid » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 1:58 PM UTC

golemotron wrote: post #53

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.

What if programming is just hard?

It's not. You need someone to patiently and properly explain concepts, though. This applies to any area, not just programming, but programming IMO lacks good teachers.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#207

Post by seanmcdirmid » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:03 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #205

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.

> These guys have delusions of grandeur. Their communication showed only the amount of that that is typical of every start up; it may be more irritating to many technical folk because, unlike most startups, programming was the problem domain and not just a tool used in the solution, making the hyperbole more obvious than normal. > I just hope Eve's failure is going to be a lesson in humility. Eve's failure does nothi…

Yes! All my real world interactions with Chris Granger have been very positive, he doesn’t come off as arrogant at all. I admit that I and others were initially put off by the hyperbolic messaging, but I see the value in it now.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#208

Post by jlebrech » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:05 PM UTC

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.

ruby is your shell and you have no password?

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#209

Post by lucozade » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:07 PM UTC

indubitable wrote: post #103

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 al…

I find SQL to have a usage profile that's, not surprisingly, similar to other declarative languages. Then tend to have a sweetspot of functionality that, if you stay within, makes them very easy to use even for less experienced people.

But outside the sweetspot, things tend to go south very rapidly and you end up needing detailed implementation knowledge that the language will fight against.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#210

Post by Sean1708 » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:10 PM UTC

exikyut wrote: post #131

pjmlp wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

I don't think that's a good analogy, I think it's more like "Climb up to base camp, then climb halfway up, then climb ...".

I learnt Python before I learnt C and learning C I was constantly having these "Aha!" where I suddenly realised why Python is the way it is. I didn't have one mental model for Python and a different mental model for C, I had one mental model for computing which was enhanced by learning C.

And on top of that Python isn't a fundamentally different language to (for example) JavaScript, sure the details differ but somebody who knows Python won't have to spend months learning JS. Arguably a language like Haskell is a fundamentally different language to something like C, but there are plenty of things that you learn when learning C that can be applied to Haskell.

I don't think the issue is all these concepts are orthogonal, I think the issue is that there are just so many concepts. Back in the 80s learning assembly might have got you 30% of the way up Mt. Everest, whereas nowadays it might only get you 1% of the way up.