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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

#151

Post by BorisVSchmid »

ibdknox wrote: post #48
steelmanning wrote: post #14

This is the same man, Chris Granger, that did a Kickstarter for Light Table, a so-called "next generation IDE," with promotional materials touting as new and revolutionary features that had been standard in IntelliJ, Visual Studio, and even Eclipse for years: http://chrononsystems.com/blog/light-table-concept-vs-realit... Light Table was also ultimately abandoned before completion. Perhaps Granger should rein in his…

Perhaps, but it's pretty easy to make judgements from the sideline about what people should or shouldn't do. I was the PM on Visual Studio. I can assure the things I showed in Light Table weren't there. Nor were they in Eclipse, as I studied that as well. You can pick and choose any number of things from our work over the years and say "Hey, but this looks like that" - I'm sure it does, but the question is does it wo…

Still using Light Table as my favorite light-weight IDE.

I hope things like https://clojuriststogether.org/ or possibly patreon will make clojure open source projects more sustainable for developers.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#152

Post by mschaef »

golemotron wrote: post #53
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.

What if programming is just hard?

> What if programming is just hard?

It's not.

I remember learning to program in Logo on a Commodore 64 when I was in the third grade. Even back then, I was decomposing my code into functions, playing around with recursion, etc. 30 years later, I was presenting to my son's 4th grade class, and was getting reasonable questions on CSS, github, etc.

The basic concepts behind programming just aren't that hard if they're accessible to elementary school students.

Where things do get tricky is when you start to scale upwards in terms of complexity, volume, and duration of service. But even then, it's all too common for engineering efforts to overestimate the need for those things. That then leads to architectural choices that not only make the system more difficult to work with, but also likely fails to meet the initial targets.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#153

Post by klibertp »

d--b wrote: post #118

I'm sorry to say but I am happy to see that this is coming to an end. These guys have delusions of grandeur. At best, they're good researchers looking into new and simpler programming paradigms. But the way they're talking about it is just horrific to me. It's full of "imagine a world where you could just..." and "we're building that world for you" BS. I just hope Eve's failure is going to be a lesson in humility.

The BS-heavy style of Chris' communication is indeed extremely off-putting, unfortunately, but it doesn't get any better if you ignore the style and go straight to the content. LightTable was an idea I rooted for, but almost every aspect of its execution was broken, and ultimately LT got dumped anyway as soon as it started getting bigger than a tech demo. They then started working on Eve, which was much more ambitious and much less precise idea, and tried to make it into a business at the same time, in typical startup timeline. There was no way it could have worked, I think.

Meanwhile, the IDE and editors situation stays the same, stuck perpetually 20 years behind Smalltalk and Common Lisp environments of the '80s and early '90s.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#154

Post by stevekemp »

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)

No, that's something I don't think I've ever seen before.

I used to read a few of the Spectrum magazines back in the day, Your Sinclair, Sinclair User, etc. But over time they all dumbed down and started to be more about advertising and game-reviews, rather than having a mixture of programming-content and other stuff.

I did get some POKEs printed though, so it wasn't all bad!

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#155

Post by airstrike »

d--b wrote: post #118

I'm sorry to say but I am happy to see that this is coming to an end. These guys have delusions of grandeur. At best, they're good researchers looking into new and simpler programming paradigms. But the way they're talking about it is just horrific to me. It's full of "imagine a world where you could just..." and "we're building that world for you" BS. I just hope Eve's failure is going to be a lesson in humility.

That's standard startup speak, though. How else are you going to get investors and early adopters excited? Everyone is competing for everyone else's fleeting attention this day and age.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#156

Post by sametmax »

coldtea wrote: post #138
linkmotif wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Surely the concept of outliers, survivorship bias, and statistical noise is easy too then! > Of course my dad had to explain it to me, because my teacher was incapable of explaining it. 10th grade, same…

We could also change the conditions.

E.G: stop promoting growth so that we eventually get a system we can manage more easily.

Or change the way media communicate so that people focus their efforts in a different direction.

Or relocate budgets from war to education and research.

And so on.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#157

Post by oselhn »

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…

I feel that problem is educational system. At least in my country it is optimized for grading what children know but it fails badly to teach or motivate them. So children are forced to learn it by themselves or find someone to help and it is enough to learn for exams. This is not fun. They are just learning things they do not understand and they don't know how to use it for anything else than exam. All attempts to improve it usually start by redesigning exams which couldn't help but it is the easiest approach with fast results.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#158

Post by TeMPOraL »

TuringTest wrote: post #147
indubitable wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm unsure programming can be made accessible, and there's a very specific reason for this. Simplifying the medium of something (in other words making it so somebody could genuinely learn a programming language, from nothing, in 5 minutes) does not necessarily make task implementation any easier. Consider writing. It's something that anybody of mean intelligence is more than capable of. And writing a novel requires n…

> Simplifying the medium of does not necessarily make task implementation any easier. Except when it does. Programming in an IDE with code completion, IntelliSense, on-line help and an attached debugger is easier than going all macho developer and programming exclusively in raw text with the pico editor, using println traces as debug. Sometimes, merely reducing the cycles that the human brain wastes on interacting wi…

That's comparing writing longhand to using Microsoft Word. The latter helps, but doesn't make writing novels fundamentally easier; in the same way, an IDE doesn't make programming fundamentally easier.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#159

Post by sreaching »

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…

you are smart. the vast majority of the population is dumber than you. the average person will struggle to master basic algebra and simple programming concepts.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#160

Post by beagle3 »

flukus wrote: post #114
paulhodge wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, people talk about necessary complexity vs unnecessary complexity. "Unnecessary complexity" is all those arcane coding rituals that we do, that our users don't know or care about, but we have to do because our current tools demand it. We can't get rid of necessary complexity and so we probably can't design a programming interface for someone that is completely illiterate in math & logic. But what we can do is 1)…

> "Unnecessary complexity" is all those arcane coding rituals that we do, that our users don't know or care about, but we have to do because our current tools demand it. What exactly do you mean by this? I can think of many things that fit this description but none that don't have good reasons to exist or remain.

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 main", accept the suggesting missing imports if you are lucky (if your ide doesn't figure them out, you have to do them yourself), and after a while you actually start running.

In the BASIC example, the only "unnecessary detail" are the unreferenced line numbers 20 and 30, which indeed become optional in later basics. In the Java example, everything I described above is incidental. It is not useless in the grand scheme of things of projects with millions of LOC and tens of developers and stuff -- but it is unnecessary for small examples. Java does not scale down.

Python mostly scales both up and down, but it still isn't as easy to start writing stuff the way it was in the 80s.

The most popular programming environment, by far, is a spreadsheet - it's not imperative or object oriented, but rather functional. and it also fails to scale up or down.

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