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Eve Version 0

chris-granger.com

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Re: Eve Version 0

#141

Post by joshuafcole »

darkmighty wrote: post #126
ibdknox wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..…

Yep, I've had some good experiences with the old StarCraft editor. It had a surprisingly good first user experience because it was immediately useful (terrain editing was very intuitive, and stock games could be played on custom maps) and had a gentle learning curve (new game features could be added in progressively to the base game).

One of our past examples worked on a similar principle to the SC trigger system [1] but we unfortunately found that it didn't scale as well to larger systems. While it was very easy to write in, it was hard for a stranger to read and intuit the implied data flow. We've had a lot of fun experimenting with different query editors, and I hope to find the time soon to do a more in depth write up on our research.

[1] https://camo.githubusercontent.com/f24714bf6429fa21ca91e4987...

Re: Eve Version 0

#142

Post by dunkelheit »

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…

In its essence programming is transforming data (and code is data too). Everything else is incidental. But if I think of the things I do in my day-to-day work as a software developer it is 99% logistics (getting data in the right place and in the right form) and 1% related to actual meaningful transformation. If my understanding is correct (I only had a cursory glance) eve attacks this problem from the promising angle by making all data available in a ready-to-query database.

Still I think there must be some hard lower limits on amount of incidental complexity. Nature just can't allow you to get rid of all of it (impossibility results from distributed systems theory come to mind) just as in manufacturing transport costs can't be zero (goods and materials can't be transported between factories faster than the speed of light after all). It will be interesting to see how eve team works around these issues.

Re: Eve Version 0

#143

Post by ZenoArrow »

27182818284 wrote: post #70
divs1210 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you're talking about. I use it almost every day for clojure/js and sometimes python when I just want a quick script. (PyCharm for actual dev).

I have it installed on my machine too. I just hear nothing about its future and it seems like folks are focused elsewhere too. E.g., this topic about Eve. Especially for something YC backed. I guess I was just expecting to hear more and such.

IIRC the next release (version 0.8 I believe) is focused on porting to use Electron for its GUI. It doesn't appear to be dead, though I'm sure the devs wouldn't mind a little help (a willingness to try ClojureScript is probably a big plus if you were interested). ClojureScript is a Lisp so it should be fairly easy to pick up the basics.

Re: Eve Version 0

#144

Post by viraptor »

> Imagine what we could do just with a version of office where every bit of information was sourced live from a database, where instead of Power Point presentations of status you could throw together a dashboard and send it to everyone in the organization.

The thing is... you can. Not a presentation / PP, but if you want to create a self-updating dashboard, you can do it in Excel. It's not going to be super easy, but you can do pretty much all of it by clicking.

Here's excel with a sheet that comes from sql database. It's trivial to add another sheet with just graphs on it. https://support.office.com/en-ie/article/Connect-to-a-SQL-Se...

But if you want to do a "dashboard proper", you can use the Power BI tool: https://support.powerbi.com/knowledgebase/articles/471664 (which looks super amazing by the way for an office product, is free, and I want to have a reason to actually use it...)

It's strange that they didn't even mention those possibilities in the post. I see how they could try to improve a lot in those approaches however.

Re: Eve Version 0

#145

Post by panic »

jordanlev wrote: post #75

At a glance, it reminds me of what MS Access was (is?)... or could have been if MS hadn't ignored it to death. So many people (myself included) were/are incredibly empowered by that program, and I still have a fond place in my heart for Access, as it was my bridge from Excel macros to "real programming". Hopefully Eve doesn't get DabbleDB'd... the world really needs a modern MS Access!

If you haven't heard of DabbleDB, this video is a good introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY. It shared some goals with Eve, like letting people easily enter and manipulate data, though as far as I know it never tried to support general-purpose programming.

Re: Eve Version 0

#146

Post by dang »

eximius wrote: post #134
dang wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've known many Excel power users who are technically minded and experts in their domains, but nevertheless are not programmers. (Edit: obviously they're programmers in the sense that they make the computer compute things, but not via a general-purpose language.) They have no interest in learning Python or JavaScript or even VBA—it doesn't fit with how they like to think. Instead, they lay out complex calculations in…

Sounds like Functional Programming might make a lot of sense to them (operating on transformations and whatnot)

There are definitely some symmetries there, but also differences. These users don't think so abstractly. They get their computation working on one set of numbers and then, if they need to reuse it, copy-paste and modify.

Re: Eve Version 0

#147

Post by gfodor »

ibdknox wrote: post #91
a-dub wrote: post #88

So every time I've seen something like this (ETL tools, LabView, Scratch, pd/max, etc) I've noticed a common problem. They're dead simple to create simple things in, but often times simple things grow into complex things over time and once things become complex things implemented in graphical programming languages they become nightmarish to maintain. Subtle logic ends up buried... Simple processes like a full search…

Check out my note on visual programming. [1] The short answer is we have lots of tools in mind that will help with this, but programming this way just creates a very different kind of system. We've built some complex things and they've remained fairly flat and we made sure that it is both readily apparent what is contributing to your current query and easy to navigate into it if you want to see more. For the most par…

On this note it seems incredibly important to make sure the medium has something analogous to refactoring in code: ways to tranform the system into a better form in discrete, safe steps that do not change the behavior.

Re: Eve Version 0

#148

Post by cmontella »

gfodor wrote: post #147
ibdknox wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out my note on visual programming. [1] The short answer is we have lots of tools in mind that will help with this, but programming this way just creates a very different kind of system. We've built some complex things and they've remained fairly flat and we made sure that it is both readily apparent what is contributing to your current query and easy to navigate into it if you want to see more. For the most par…

On this note it seems incredibly important to make sure the medium has something analogous to refactoring in code: ways to tranform the system into a better form in discrete, safe steps that do not change the behavior.

Version control, refactoring, code reuse, etc. are big items on the roadmap for the next release. We have some interesting ideas, including the realization that refactoring in this sort of system can take the form of graph rewrites.

Here's a post on our dev diary about version control: http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2015/04/22/version-control/

Re: Eve Version 0

#149

Post by dgudkov »

shaunxcode wrote: post #122
dgudkov wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for checking it out! As we're targeting Tableau users so eventually we will release an OS X version.

Re: Eve Version 0

#150

Post by hbt »

shaunxcode wrote: post #122
dgudkov wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

use a virtual machine or install windows as dual boot.

If this software solves a problem you are really having, nothing would stop you.

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