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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

#231

Post by pjmlp »

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?

Looks nice.

Maybe some kind of GUI would be better, as a way to ease typing commands.

Something like Pythonista or Lisping on iOS.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#232

Post by zcoyle »

jlebrech wrote: post #208
phaemon wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's bash

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#233

Post by mpweiher »

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.

A couple of points:

1. Making programming accessible probably means making software more accessible.

I remember a study of what mental capacity was most correlated with being able to learn foreign language. It was empathy. So a large part is wanting to communicate. If you want to communicate, you will find a way, and I think we see the same thing in programming. So called "non-programmers" learn the most absurd programming languages and systems if they are motivated. Also see Minecraft. And amazing/horrifying Excel spreadsheets.

One of the issues I see with "novice environments" is that they tend to be very separate from everything else on the machine. I would find that very demotivating.

What I would love to see is "open source as if we meant it", meaning programs that do something we want to do, that we would use, written in such a way (probably also: in such a language) that tinkering/adapting is a reasonable proposition. Yes, that means I don't think that currently is the case: except for the core-dev team, is it a reasonable proposition for people who want to adapt GNUmeric to download the source code and start tinkering? For novices?

2. I am not convinced by the low-end vs. high-end distinction

I think a lot of the same things that make programming awful for beginners also make it awful for advanced programmers. We have just gotten used to the pain and accept it, though I am not sure why.

3. I am not convinced by starting over from scratch

There are reasons why we have what we have, and not all of them are bad.

4. I am not convinced by not starting over from scratch

Of the reasons why we have what we have, a lot of them are bad. A lot needs to be reexamined and rethought.

Resolving that contradiction (thesis, antithesis?) is difficult, it requires looking at what we have in a lot of detail, including the history of how we got here, where we need apply tweaks and where we can interact properly with the rich computing tapestry we have.

Just extending what we have is probably not a solution, because one of the problems is too much cruft, but just starting over from scratch is likely to lead to cool but ultimately superficial projects.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#234

Post by jonathanedwards »

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…

This. There is little funding for the kind of research that will lead us out of the tarpit (and less with the demise of HARC). My hat is off to Eve's investors for being unusually far-thinking for SV. But ultimately this is the responsibility of our research institutions, which unfortunately have other priorities.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#235

Post by jonathanedwards »

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…

Having this conversation on HN risks bias. Most of us have been selected for our cognitive skills. Regular people have a terrible time learning programming. See https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/224105-learning-compute... I suspect that programming is so hard not because it is necessarily so, but because it has been developed by people like us for people like us, who can tolerate or even enjoy massive complexity.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#236

Post by acemarke »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #167
flukus wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I'm wrong because I'm not familiar with it. But isn't that a way to declare dependencies and share the information with other developers? That's something that has a good reason to exist. Replacing that functionality would involve a way more complicated solution to the same problem.

Everyrhing depends on the scope. Webpack is a complicated tool solving a complex problem, which makes it useful in large projects. But it's also way overcomplicated and unnecessary for small projects. A lot of incidental complexity comes from misapplication of powerful tools to simple problems.

FWIW, Webpack 4 will have "zero-config" defaults set up out of the box: https://github.com/webpack/webpack/releases/tag/v4.0.0-beta....

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#237

Post by root_axis »

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

That is definitely true, but misses my point. Most students have to deal with this "much bigger problem" but most students don't have a parent with the time, education and patience to teach their kid calculus. The GP just comes off as arrogant and out of touch when he laughs off the rigorousness of calculus while simultaneously humble bragging that his dad was his personal calculus tutor. He also didn't miss an opportunity to shit on normy parents who pollute their children's brains with such banal pastimes as sports, games and netflix. It's ridiculous.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#238

Post by lilactown »

RubenSandwich wrote: post #13
haskellandchill wrote: post #12

This is very sad. I’ve been looking for something like Eve to develop difficult user interfaces in and was hoping it would hit 1.0. Wonder if there is any framework trying to do similar things in the JavaScript ecosystem, or targeting that ecosystem with code generation.

Precept is almost the same model: https://github.com/CoNarrative/precept . Not quite JS, but ClojureScript, which is close.

This is really awesome! Even better, it introduced me to Clara.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#239

Post by erikpukinskis »

flukus wrote: post #80
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. We've been doing this for as long as computers have existed and have made virtually no progress (pun intended) since 3GL languages. No other industry has ever tried as hard as ours has to make itself redundant. Programming is about as simple now as it will be for the foreseeable future, any simplification sacrifices…

Ultron, Hawkeye, and Iron Man are fictional characters. It’s easy to imagine an omnipotent programming AI, but we have no reason to believe any such thing could exist.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#240

Post by phaemon »

jlebrech wrote: post #208
phaemon wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As zcoyle said, it's bash. Why did you think it was Ruby when you correctly guessed it was a shell?

AFAIK, the closest in Ruby would be something like:

  for i in 1..10 do
    puts "This works too! Number " + i.to_s
  end
As for passwords, I boot directly into single-user mode and start the network manually. It's the only way to be sure.
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