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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

#241

Post by phaemon »

beagle3 wrote: post #187
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.

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 limi…

I do get what you mean; my 48k Spectrum was certainly a simpler machine than my current laptop!

But I still think there are simple things that beginners can do. The whole SAVE, LOAD, RUN concepts also had to be learned. And you only need to know some text editor to be able to save a file. It can then be run with `bash myprogram`. And then later you can add the concepts of adding a shebang and making the file executable.

Also, the huge advantage of teaching shell commands is that it is actually, currently useful. I use those commands every day at work, despite having learnt them initially on an old Sun server many moons ago. I can't say the same for Spectrum Basic! :)

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#242

Post by chubot »

TuringTest wrote: post #223
chubot wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes I think that is a good use case. It has the benefit of being concrete and useful, yet there is less notion of "time", which is a difficult part of programming.

There are a bunch of academic papers about "example-based data cleaning", but I don't know much about them. I think the idea is that you provide examples and the system tries to deduce a data cleaning function. Of course, if you do this for the user, then they might learn fewer programming concepts, but be able to get the job done more quickly. So it's a tradeoff.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#243

Post by chc »

jsjohnst wrote: post #197
smt88 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "One thing I’ve noticed is that nothing humans have invented or discovered is hard." This is one of the most absurd and arrogant statements I've ever read on HN. If this is true, why don't you read some textbooks for a few years and start flawlessly performing surgery? Why don't you write a world-renowned novel? > "A child can learn Python or JavaScript. You just have to show them that it’s cool. But instead most a…

> why don't you read some textbooks for a few years and start flawlessly performing surgery? You missed the point because you weren’t open minded enough (admittedly OP left it ripe for you to jump to this conclusion). What I believe OP was trying to say was that the example you mentioned above isn’t some impossibly hard thing that only those with a special gift can do, but rather that with the right motivation, enoug…

You've moved the goalposts from "hard" to "impossibly hard." That doesn't seem like what they were saying to me. The original comment even contrasted it with "pretty easy."

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#244

Post by dragonwriter »

ModernMech wrote: post #34

For anyone interested, here was Eve in its last incarnation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zenELksXotI

I don't think there is a better possible illustration of losing focus than that.

You start with the goal of making it easier for people to deal with real world problems through unobtrusive programming, citing Excel as on of your key inspirations, build a unified browser and server side runtime on the basis of applying (and, if I understand some of the dev blogs correctly, perhaps significantly advancing from) cutting edge research in the space of implementation of rules engines / production systems / databases, you design and implement a simple, expressive, beginner-friendly language around the semantics of runtime, and your demo of how all of that comes together is...using an IDE property editor style interface to manipulate bouncing balls?

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#245

Post by QuantumAphid »

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…

SQL as a language is simple and easy. It's applying it properly for a relational algebra of a database which makes it far more complicated.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#246

Post by zubairq »

pjmlp wrote: post #141
stevekemp wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scroll down to the bottom of this page: https://usborne.com/browse-books/features/computer-and-codin... Just seeing those covers gave me a huge nostalgia-trip, from my own time programming the ZX Spectrum in the 80s. (First in BASIC, then in Z80 assembly via the fine manual.)

Lovely! Have you also used the Input magazines? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_(magazine)

I loved the input magazines. I’ll have to dig out my old ones ! I think we only had them in the uk though?

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#247

Post by shalabhc »

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…

The big assumption you are making is that we have already found all the 'algebra and calculus' models - i.e. the good mental tools - in computing.

You could do division in roman numerals and perhaps people even then justified it with 'math is just hard, learn and deal with it' but things can get easier when you have better models, better representations and better mental tools. A big advantage of the computers is that they themselves are dynamic and interactive and so they can actually amplify the mental tools.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#248

Post by ModernMech »

thinkpad20 wrote: post #104
cmontella wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because low-end programming is not a short-term growth play. We have to play the long game. This is true, and one of the reasons we opted to look at the acquisition route rather than raising another round; with raising another round, a whole lot of expectations would be attached to that surrounding growth, while we were still operating heavily in a research capacity. Languages like Rust and Go that have nice corpor…

> It's hard to pitch a greenfield project like Eve, because there's no real great way to quantify the benefits of a language before it's been fully realized. Plenty of languages have been developed without major corporate backing (especially in the beginning). Off the top of my head, elm, elixir, Haskell, ML, ruby, python, coffeescript, purescript, Idris, Agda, pony and I’m sure many others were developed at least in…

Each of the languages you mention are very small deltas (relatively) from our current state of the art (some more than others). It's not hard to convince one of the benefits of such languages, because they are already anchored. e.g. X language is like Y but with Types. Or, W language is like Z but with pure functions. etc.

Eve was very different from any language in widespread adoption, to the point where using it didn't even feel like programming at times. Therefore, it was difficult to quantify the benefits to others (especially companies) who have not experienced them first hand. With Eve, we didn't even know the full scope of supposed benefits until we started actually using the system we imagined in our heads.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#249

Post by TuringTest »

chubot wrote: post #242
TuringTest wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes I think that is a good use case. It has the benefit of being concrete and useful, yet there is less notion of "time", which is a difficult part of programming. There are a bunch of academic papers about "example-based data cleaning", but I don't know much about them. I think the idea is that you provide examples and the system tries to deduce a data cleaning function. Of course, if you do this for the user, then…

I like the approach of the (experimental) Lapis editor, which allows you to select several examples and it infers a selection rule written in an English-like language. And it works on plain text, not just tables. You can tweak the rule, and then simultaneously edit all the records selected with it.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#250

Post by dang »

testouts wrote: post #98
golemotron wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if programming is just hard?

something was said similar to this , but the comment was deleted "we need to add certificats and raise the bar, quality over quantity" Im not sure why that comment was delete, hn is becoming very authoritarian

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