Eve Version 0 • Hacker News Board

Re: Eve Version 0

#121

Post by hendzen » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 7:28 PM UTC

jamii wrote: post #112

igravious wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take from the abstract of Dedalus is "and adds an explicit notion of logical time to the language" If you're interested in building a tool that relies on distributed communication and data flow it makes sense to bake a notion of logical time into the the system. Boolean logic has no notion of time. If you propose x != y say, you could be saying that throughout the lifetime of the system x is never equal to y or yo…

It makes sense, I think :) Hickey's ideas about time and state are also pretty relevant - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hic... One of the things we are still working on is expressing non-monotonic logic nicely (things like "birds can fly, but penguins can't, but Harry the Rocket Penguin can"). It's unpleasant in standard datalog but I think we can provide a nicer interface.

Is the endgame here making eve applications automatically distributed or parallelized?

I ask because the monotonic logic that Daedalus excels at expressing is quite limiting. Unless you are in an execution environment where operation ordering/synchronization is expensive (i.e. among a set of distributed processes) - the nice order-independent properties that CALM analysis gives you don't really buy you much.

Re: Eve Version 0

#122

Post by shaunxcode » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 7:35 PM UTC

dgudkov wrote: post #105

rgoddard wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am currently working as an Actuarial Analyst, but I have also worked several years as a programmer. As an analyst the tools I use are excel, access, SAS Enterprise guide and Oracle SQL developer. One of the big problems I face is that we have no good way to abstract away a process and really make it reusable. My general work flow is using SAS to pull data from multiple sources, combine and run the data through some…

Look at my EasyMorph ( http://easymorph.com ). It's a visual replacement for scripted data transformations. People use it to replace SAS and Visual Basic scripting. It also allows creating reusable modules. Contact me at @easymorph.com if it looks interesting to you.

Hey, I clicked through, read the tutorial, got excited about your examples.. tried to download and found out it was windows only! I would have totally evaluated it further if there were an os x/linux option.

Re: Eve Version 0

#123

Post by nekopa » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 7:42 PM UTC

MrDosu wrote: post #48

nekopa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain more, or even share your project? It sounds quite interesting.

Unfortunately I cannot share code. It is actually quite simple. There is a graphical designer that connects to a data warehouse. There someone defines a graph like structure with nodes that contain a collection of data rows and relations to other nodes of data rows. This results in a library that you can interop with in existing software tools of the customer to query that graph model naturally (Stuff like Location('…

Thanks for the explanation, no worries about not being given able to share code.

You do make it sound simple, so therefore I will make a typical HN comment (god help my karma :) :

If you can abstract it away enough, make it SaaS, sounds like a startup idea!

Re: Eve Version 0

#124

Post by gavinpc » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 7:44 PM UTC

mkozlows wrote: post #44

dgreensp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the opposite message, which is that programming tools and the process of programming are so bad, it's hard to get a computer to do a simple task for you without tearing your hair out, never mind building a UI. A better IDE (basically a better text editor) doesn't even scratch the surface.

The thing is, it's easy to say something is hard. Programming is definitely hard! The question is: Is it hard essentially, or is it hard accidentally? That is, can you remove unnecessary complexity from programming and suddenly it'll become easy? That was the proposition behind first LightTable, and then Eve as originally conceived. But neither of them really found a satisfying answer, a way to say "hey, for making y…

They are not "starting from scratch" if they had such a focus on past work and research. I hope they publish something on that.

Re: Eve Version 0

#125

Post by jamii » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 7:47 PM UTC

gavinpc wrote: post #124

mkozlows wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, it's easy to say something is hard. Programming is definitely hard! The question is: Is it hard essentially, or is it hard accidentally? That is, can you remove unnecessary complexity from programming and suddenly it'll become easy? That was the proposition behind first LightTable, and then Eve as originally conceived. But neither of them really found a satisfying answer, a way to say "hey, for making y…

They are not "starting from scratch" if they had such a focus on past work and research. I hope they publish something on that.

https://github.com/witheve/Eve/blob/dev/design/bibliography....

http://incidentalcomplexity.com/

:)

Re: Eve Version 0

#126

Post by darkmighty » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 7:50 PM UTC

ibdknox wrote: post #115

akkartik wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any thoughts on how automated tests would work in this world? You mentioned email filters and responders in the OP, and I remember that everytime I start creating filters I quickly hit a point at which debugging or changing them becomes fraught.

We do! One neat thing about our architecture is that literally everything is just data and side-effects happen outside of the system itself. This means if you disconnect the "watchers" that do things like send email based on the presence of rows in the email table, you can safely do anything you want. This resolves a bunch of issues around testing for us. The overall plan is to provide a bunch of really interesting g…

I have to ask: are you familiar with Blizzard's GUI script programming? It introduced me to programming and allowed 10 year old me, terrible at logic (and never before programmed!), to make games without reading much external references (it is completely self-explanatory).

For example, by reading those I think you get immediately an ideal of what it does:

http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd195/thehelper-andrewgos...

You can build those from a predetermined set of Events (if you're advanced you can create custom events), so just by reading from a list of events/actions you an figure out how to do whatever you want. I think it's similar to Scratch but it does away with the clutter -- it's not exactly trying to make programming "visual", it's more just merging documentation and code, so you have all the building blocks needed to build any application right in from of you.

I think this kind of rethinking you're doing can truly change how programming is like for beginners or people who want to make specific tools/application (and not learn a plethora of things they'll never use)!

Re: Eve Version 0

#127

Post by jamii » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 7:51 PM UTC

hendzen wrote: post #121

jamii wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense, I think :) Hickey's ideas about time and state are also pretty relevant - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hic... One of the things we are still working on is expressing non-monotonic logic nicely (things like "birds can fly, but penguins can't, but Harry the Rocket Penguin can"). It's unpleasant in standard datalog but I think we can provide a nicer interface.

Is the endgame here making eve applications automatically distributed or parallelized? I ask because the monotonic logic that Daedalus excels at expressing is quite limiting. Unless you are in an execution environment where operation ordering/synchronization is expensive (i.e. among a set of distributed processes) - the nice order-independent properties that CALM analysis gives you don't really buy you much.

I can't see us using CALM for anything in the near future. The focus right now is just on making the basic programming experience smooth. We chose Dedalus because the discrete, synchronous model of time makes it easy to separate things which are truly stateful from things which are not and to handle both in a live, interactive environment. CALM is just a bonus.

Re: Eve Version 0

#128

Post by athenot » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 7:52 PM UTC

Too wrote: post #90

cmontella wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree. People who are not programmers use abstract reasoning and modelling skills all the time in their daily lives. They more than have the skills to solve this problem: You have a list of friends and where they are, you have your own location. Find the list of friends that are near your location, and send an alert (text, e-mail, whatever). How hard is that? There is absolutely no inherent complexi…

I frequently use software specifications as a counter argument to this. Non developers can't write specifications without leaving out major key bits in the information, my point then would be that since they are not constrained by limitations of programming language but only their own expressions in written text that should not be a limiting factor. Your example is extremely simple and could work for a new coder but…

This can be solved by having sensible defaults. So instead of having to specify everything, there's a baseline behavior. Most may be acceptable, some is not. Fine, then the user can change what needs to be changed.

The most important part is that the user is not spec'ing in the dark, instead they are modifying existing behavior to suit what they want.

Re: Eve Version 0

#129

Post by igravious » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 7:57 PM UTC

jamii wrote: post #112

igravious wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take from the abstract of Dedalus is "and adds an explicit notion of logical time to the language" If you're interested in building a tool that relies on distributed communication and data flow it makes sense to bake a notion of logical time into the the system. Boolean logic has no notion of time. If you propose x != y say, you could be saying that throughout the lifetime of the system x is never equal to y or yo…

It makes sense, I think :) Hickey's ideas about time and state are also pretty relevant - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hic... One of the things we are still working on is expressing non-monotonic logic nicely (things like "birds can fly, but penguins can't, but Harry the Rocket Penguin can"). It's unpleasant in standard datalog but I think we can provide a nicer interface.

10 minutes into the Rich Hickey video and I can see why you responded to me with a link to it. This is indeed what I'm getting at; so many languages use fundamentally the same underlying logical and state model. Rich mentions single-dispatch, stateful OO. To that I would add boolean logic. Our systems or so riven by it we don't even see it. And I reckon it doesn't have to be that way! I can totally see why Eve is written in Rust from the 10 minutes of this talk that I've seen, and I can see that it is the incidental complexity of managing the lifetime of objects in your head in C++ that have forced this shift. Or, as per Hickey, Clojure-wards.

Still though, both Rust and Clojure, both presume an omnipresent bivalent atemporal logical discourse. If you're working on a different logic (or sets of logic?) in Eve then why not make them dynamically user-selectable at run-time in an intuitive manner :) Granted, I have _no earthly idea_ in practise what this means but when you reflect on how humans manipulate concepts internally you see that we have the machinery for this built into us -- or learnt somehow at a very early age. Tapping into this fluid logical apparatus would be ever so neat.

Re: Eve Version 0

#130

Post by jamii » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 7:59 PM UTC

PopeOfNope wrote: post #120

jamii wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was some discussion in http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2015/02/24/january--february... > While running in the browser is a requirement for Eve, it's always been clear that using javascript directly was not a long-term option. So many of our implementation problems come down to lack of control over data layout. For Eve we need to implement: > New types (like intervals) - but there is a space overhead of 24 extra…

I'm curious, why not LuaJIT? It's small and fast and when you need it to be faster, it has excellent C FFI and the ability to add inline assembly[0]. [0]: https://gist.github.com/lukego/d15f3a65bd316ea2c2b6

We needed control over memory layout and some path to running in the browser. I considered writing the data-structures in C and the rest in Lua but it would require more manual memory management than Rust and there is no clear path to compiling mixed Lua/C projects into Javascript.