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

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#211

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:19 PM UTC

TuringTest wrote: post #203

TeMPOraL wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There's the whole discipline of End-User Development dedicated to explore that area.

Thanks for the name, I didn't know there was a field for that.

> 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.

Great analogy!

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#212

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:23 PM UTC

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.

You say that like it isn't a robust conversation that a significant segment of the community has not only been having but trying out solutions to for decades.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#213

Post by kimi » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:24 PM UTC

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…

While I was a Commodore boy in the 80's, I know what you're talking about and I came across a book that had the same feeling "Clojure for the Brave and True": https://www.braveclojure.com/ - it was like a jump into the past.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#214

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:31 PM UTC

yinso wrote: post #91

Programming languages for non-programmers needs to be embedded in a vessel. Excel is probably the quintessential vessel. When people are trying to solve a need they have, they will invest the effort to figure out the tools, including learning enough programming to solve their problems.

The Eve team emphatically, from day one, had this stance.

It is perhaps indicative of a key strategic error that the course of the public work on Eve did not involve as clear as picture of the target vessel as of the programming language, especially given the churning on the PL implementation that dominated the last phases of the public effort at Eve.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#215

Post by diggan » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:36 PM UTC

zubairq wrote: post #199

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…

Nice link by the way. I was more referring to this published by The Atlantic (incidently owned by Steve Jobs family trust): https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/savin... https://www.recode.net/2017/7/28/16055162/laurene-powell-job... Sorry this thread flamed up a bit. I was just trying to express my gratitude to the Eve guys

No worries, I understand and have gratitude towards the folks working on it as well. But I don't agree with that they changed the entire industry.

The second link you posted mentions nothing of Swift. The first one has the following quote about Swift:

> The default language for making new iPhone and Mac apps, called Swift, was developed by Apple from the ground up to support an environment, called Playgrounds, that was directly inspired by Light Table.

Which seems to agree with the previous quote I posted. Light Table inspired Playgrounds, not Swift.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#216

Post by chriswarbo » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

rntz wrote: post #55

golemotron wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if programming is just hard?

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.

> Building bridges is hard

I disagree. It's pretty easy to, say, find a suitable log, stand it up by the edge of a stream, and topple it over. It's more about the strength required than the thinking; and if it's a struggle, we have JCBs, chainsaws, etc. to help.

For something a little more robust, hire an AVLB. For more permanence, buy something like a Bailey or Medium Girder bridge.

Of course, I'm being facetious; but my point is that "programming" covers a vast spectrum. We don't teach kids to write under the expectation that they'll be modern day Shakespeares (or build Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridges); we do it because writing is incredibly useful, even if it's as mundane as a shopping list on the back of one's hand (or a log over a stream).

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#217

Post by nikofeyn » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:45 PM UTC

lucozade wrote: post #200

robertkrahn01 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Languages: Swift, Go, Rust, Julia, Haskell, JS, C++ etc etc Dev envs: VSCode, Electron, more build systems than you can shake a stick at, VMs, containers, playgrounds etc Non-textual programming. For general purpose programming, I can't think of any. There are some dead ends that will probably remain so. For niche programming, there are loads. And to my point, Lisp, Smalltalk and Plan 9 are all good examples of faile…

labview is a general purpose visual programming language. it's as general purpose as, say, python. it's just different and proprietary.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#218

Post by Firadeoclus » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

PyComfy wrote: post #173

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Indeed. Also interesting is a look at games themselves, especially those that show a long trajectory from beginner to experienced player with significantly different interaction patterns between the two groups.

It would seem that practically no programmer's tool has ever received the attention to interface detail that is common in the best games.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#219

Post by exDM69 » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 2:55 PM UTC

Firadeoclus wrote: post #188

exDM69 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Abundance of choice makes things harder for sure.

But overall it's so much easier these days. Even if you're spoiled for choice, you can get the tools and documentation for free. Back then it was either the BASIC interpreter that shipped with your computer (QBASIC for me) or the assembler (debug.com) or paying big bucks to buy a compiler. I was lucky that my dad could obtain a PASCAL and a C compiler through his work.

These days you might have too much choice but back then for a kid like me, the choice was what was available in the local library. So not much choice at all.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#220

Post by zubairq » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

diggan wrote: post #215

zubairq wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice link by the way. I was more referring to this published by The Atlantic (incidently owned by Steve Jobs family trust): https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/savin... https://www.recode.net/2017/7/28/16055162/laurene-powell-job... Sorry this thread flamed up a bit. I was just trying to express my gratitude to the Eve guys

No worries, I understand and have gratitude towards the folks working on it as well. But I don't agree with that they changed the entire industry. The second link you posted mentions nothing of Swift. The first one has the following quote about Swift: > The default language for making new iPhone and Mac apps, called Swift, was developed by Apple from the ground up to support an environment, called Playgrounds, that w…

yeah, good point. Sorry I said Swift, but I meant Playgrounds. I guess I see Playgrounds as the interactive IDE part of SWIFT, like Visual Studio is for C++, so I don't really separate the two in my mind. Anyway, we can agree to disagree on the other point, I just like the discussion :)