Just from looking at the pics on the blog post, it looks much less simple or intuitive than writing a few lines of python. There's a lot of money to be made selling such things to enterprises that don't know better though.
Eve Version 0
151–160 of 195 posts
Re: Eve Version 0
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree -- if Facebook had an "export my friend list to Excel" button, then plenty of non-programmers could perform this task using existing tools. I read the tutorial and I am sort of struggling to see what benefit this would give someone who was already an Excel power-user.
Excel is a very powerful tool, but it reaches a utility plateau very quickly when you start going outside its intended purpose of being a spreadsheet application. You're correct that a power-user can do pretty much anything in Excel, but when you start talking about actual database operations (like Join), state, and UI, then you're at the point where the tool is working against you.
I'm not sure what you mean by state and UI, but Excel definitely has a join-like functionality in the form of vlookup function.
https://support.office.com/en-in/article/VLOOKUP-function-0b...
Re: Eve Version 0
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
if solving one problem involves creating another, it's good to be cautious.
Re: Eve Version 0
#154Earlier 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.
Yeah that would be nice ...
... but unfortunately impossible, as you are solving the halting problem.
Re: Eve Version 0
#155The new value proposition is reminiscent of DabbleDB, which was a groundbreaking product that didn't seem to get enough traction to sustain a business. Is this comparison apt? Any ideas on why Eve has a better chance of succeeding?
The comparison is very apt.
Dabble is the main reason I don't have much hope for Eve.
Dabble was amazing, it did everything in the Eve Tutorial much better than Eve does, it didn't require installing anything on your computer, it looked beautiful, it was very easy to use, it had great collaboration, and it had a TON more features than Eve, and it had excellent customer support. Dabble is one of my all-time favorite apps and I think it's one of the best webapps ever. And it didn't succeed.
I guess it's hard to know what might have happened with Dabble had they not created a separate analytics tool that was attractive to Twitter. Would someone else have bought Dabble and continued to support it? What if it had been built on a more mainstream architecture? I always thought Dabble would have been sustainable as a small business. Something about recent history (i.e. LightTable) tells me these guys aren't likely to toil away supporting this for the next 10-20 years to earn a modest income.
I can think of at least three limitations Dabble had that some future version of Eve might not have:
1) There were only so many primitive operations (conversions, calculations, filters, etc) and so there were some "programs" that you couldn't create.
2) For creating a UI, you basically had forms and reports. They had a great implementation of both of those, but they were the only tools you had.
3) You couldn't see the code. Just as Excel has the code hidden in a cell somewhere, in Dabble if you had a derived field (some calculation) you had to click on the field to see how it was calculated. It appears Eve has or will have some way of graphing these calculations so a program can be "read" without clicking on fields to see their formulas.
Re: Eve Version 0
#156So let's get this right...they couldn't write a stable IDE (reaching version 1.0) without re-writing it several times, inventing crazy tools to get around their platform limits (Lighttable runs on NodeJS?!?). And now they expect us to think they can revolutionize computing not just an IDE?
Sorry, but this project is way to ambitious and run by people who have way to weak of a track history to inspire confidence. Go back and finish what you started on, and what you took money for, instead of taking more funding for an even bigger project.
Reminds me of half the Kickstarter games these days: "whelp that didn't work, good thing we don't have to give you your money back!".
Re: Eve Version 0
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree -- if Facebook had an "export my friend list to Excel" button, then plenty of non-programmers could perform this task using existing tools. I read the tutorial and I am sort of struggling to see what benefit this would give someone who was already an Excel power-user.
> If Facebook had an "export my friend list to Excel" button, then plenty of non-programmers could perform this task using existing tools. The task was to send alerts whenever a friend was nearby. Excel is amazing for non-professional programmers, but it doesn't deal well with changing data, unless you want to click the "export my friend list to Excel" button every five minutes. There are tools that will act as real-…
Have you seen the work on Gneiss (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~shihpinc/gneiss.html) on user programmable spreadsheets?
Re: Eve Version 0
#158Is anyone using LightTable on a daily basis? I sponsored the kickstarter but never really followed up on what happened to it.
Looks like the authoer coded himself into a corner and gave up, and is trying this instead. Not inspiring faith in the prospects for Eve.
Re: Eve Version 0
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
An excel power-user is indistinguishable from a programmer. If you are an excel power-user, and don't think you are a programmer, learn javascript, http://eloquentjavascript.net/ .
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…
The only thing a super complex formula is missing is the notion of a for loop. In lieu of that, I used to pull a column down as many times as the loop needed to run. Then I discovered macros, then I discovered javascript.
Re: Eve Version 0
#160The change of focus is perhaps hard to understand without more context. Basically, there are two really different modes of programming: Most of what we see on HN is about building applications, servers, websites etc. Big, monolithic things that take weeks to years and are deployed to somewhere else and used by lots of people. Most programming tools are built for this kind of work, where the time between writing the c…
My opinion is that programming is literally defined by editing text files with difficult to comprehend source code. Anything that is easier or deviates from that is by definition not programming and therefore something users do.
The rationalization is that anyone using an easier tool to program computers without as much code must not be able to use code. Therefore us programmers are better than them.
Its very similar to the earlier era of punchcard programmers scoffing at assembly language programmers. Or hand-tool craftsmen sneering at mass-produced component-based manufacturing.
That infantile belief system will persist until super-intelligent AIs revise it or (maybe) the next generation wises up.