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

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#221

Post by TuringTest » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:23 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #211

TuringTest wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you didn't know EUD, you may enjoy the seminal works Watch what I do [1] which is available online (mostly; some figures are missing) and Your Wish is My Command [2]. These books are compilations of early articles which explore very interesting approaches to building software artifacts, which look nothing like programming in a general language (though some of them resemble what Bret Victor is making popular nowadays).

BTW, spreadsheets are considered the most successful End-User Development tool; it's not coincidence that modern web languages resemble more and more its reactive programming model.

[1] http://acypher.com/wwid/

[2] http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/PBE/Your-Wish/

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#222

Post by tmzt » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:23 PM UTC

exDM69 wrote: post #219

Firadeoclus wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think the point is nickleodeon.com and disney.com are just as easy to visit as github, Netflix is more likely to be on a kids tablet than Scratch.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#223

Post by TuringTest » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:33 PM UTC

chubot wrote: post #20

pbiggar wrote: post #7

As someone making something in the same general space as Eve, very sad to see this happen. Thanks for taking a shot and proving that there are other ways of thinking about programming! Looking forward to the writeup.

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…

As a tool that touches the big problem indirectly, I'd want to have a good tool for data cleanup ("data wrangling") that felt more WYSIWYG.

Programmers have their sed and their grep and their regular expressions APIs in Python, but that doesn't help someone who doesn't know programming languages or how to build a precise expression to catch data, and prefer point-and-click and copy&paste.

I'm aware of OpenRefine, but it's somewhat hard to feed it data and create stable cleanup workflows.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#224

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:35 PM UTC

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.

Yes, however we would value as gold those books, because they were the only source to the knowledge of the machine.

It was also what made demoscene competitions so interesting, there wasn't a web page explaining how to pull off those tricks.

It was curiosity and reading between the lines of those books that spiked out the curiosity to try out such tricks.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#225

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:36 PM UTC

TuringTest wrote: post #221

TeMPOraL wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you didn't know EUD, you may enjoy the seminal works Watch what I do [1] which is available online (mostly; some figures are missing) and Your Wish is My Command [2]. These books are compilations of early articles which explore very interesting approaches to building software artifacts , which look nothing like programming in a general language (though some of them resemble what Bret Victor is making popular nowad…

Thank you! Haven't heard of those books; putting them on my reading list straight away!

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#226

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:37 PM UTC

exDM69 wrote: post #219

Firadeoclus wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

On southern Europe there was also other option, (cough) street markets.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#227

Post by lucozade » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:37 PM UTC

nikofeyn wrote: post #217

lucozade wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's fair. Same can be said for some of the educational tools too.

More of a cul de sac than a dead end.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#228

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:38 PM UTC

rtpg wrote: post #164

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.

Here's some really silly examples. They all have reasons, and it makes sense in context, but it's part of the deal. - Java code needs to be in a class. I can't open up a file and start typing immediately - bool(midnight) being false - C header ifdef silliness to make sure you don't double include a header - circular dependency import issues in many languages - strings and bash as the lowest common denominator meaning…

> Java code needs to be in a class. I can't open up a file and start typing immediately

Since Java 9 not anymore, thanks jshell.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#229

Post by sli » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:43 PM UTC

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

I've had professors that I absolutely confirmed did not know the subject they were teaching. I had a web application development class during college where I had to dispute my exam grades every time because the professor would mark things wrong that were not wrong, and I'd have to go show him the code running.

Except for the final, I think he gave up trying to fight it and just gave me a 100 on that one, because I know I missed one of the CSS questions.

We never actually built a webapp in that class, either. Luckily for me, I'd been doing it for years already (older student, this time around), but I feel bad for the other students who were new to it.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#230

Post by TuringTest » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:46 PM UTC

flukus wrote: post #114

paulhodge wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, people talk about necessary complexity vs unnecessary complexity. "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. We can't get rid of necessary complexity and so we probably can't design a programming interface for someone that is completely illiterate in math & logic. But what we can do is 1)…

> "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.

One finding by the people doing Eve is that common users don't get lexical scopes. If I give something a name, why can't I access it everywhere using that name? Scopes are an artifact of how programming languages have evolved as an abstraction over the runtime stack; that complexity is unnecessary.

(Note that this is orthogonal to namespaces - i.e. ways to handle naming conflicts- nor encapsulation -providing a single entry point for changing a variable. Lexical scope was not created to solve either of that).