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Eve: Programming designed for humans

programming.witheve.com

21–30 of 401 posts

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess if you approach it as a "programming language" it's odd. I understood nothing of the syntax nor the semantics. But you have to admit that the way it relates different dimensions of a "program" is much more approachable than any IDE out there, in a way that is more "humane" I guess.

In what way is this more "humane"? Programming languages by design are for human consumption. In what way is this "special" or "designed" for them?

How I see it, languages are only one projection of what a program is. The missing part is what confuses "normal" people (unlike people who spent long hours learning how to map things in their head). This project reminds me of AOP, old IBM multidimensional orthogonal concerns projects. You can go back and forth between different views of the program, that helps tremendously.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#22

Sorry, but what about this is "designed for humans"? What do the keywords mean? What's the language paradigm? Why do I want this when it's essentially coalescing a lot of APIs into a language that you've provided no spec for? Why would I want my language to work with slack?! I'm not impressed. It just looks like another functional language with a bunch of addons tacked on to make things "easier" or "for humans". Drop…

Hey! That "for humans" crap worked really well for making my grid system popular! :^)

"Because it will pull investors" is a perfectly valid response around here. :)

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#23

Sorry, but what about this is "designed for humans"? What do the keywords mean? What's the language paradigm? Why do I want this when it's essentially coalescing a lot of APIs into a language that you've provided no spec for? Why would I want my language to work with slack?! I'm not impressed. It just looks like another functional language with a bunch of addons tacked on to make things "easier" or "for humans". Drop…

Hey! That "for humans" crap worked really well for making my grid system popular! :^)

Next thing you know, we'll be marketing it as a "fresh, humanely designed, organic, farm-raised" programming language. ;)

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#24

Sorry, but what about this is "designed for humans"? What do the keywords mean? What's the language paradigm? Why do I want this when it's essentially coalescing a lot of APIs into a language that you've provided no spec for? Why would I want my language to work with slack?! I'm not impressed. It just looks like another functional language with a bunch of addons tacked on to make things "easier" or "for humans". Drop…

Don't think of it as a replacement for javascript. Think of it as a replacement for excel.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint: the example of the document containing blocks of code inside what looked more like a word document, to me, exactly explains visually what "designed for humans" means in this context, and I think it's well put.

I'm sorry, but that doesn't give the connotation that it's "designed for humans". Perhaps if they could give a clear indication of what that means other than "it's in a word document", I'd be more inclined to look at it a little harder.

Wow dude, you're really salty.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#26

Sorry, but what about this is "designed for humans"? What do the keywords mean? What's the language paradigm? Why do I want this when it's essentially coalescing a lot of APIs into a language that you've provided no spec for? Why would I want my language to work with slack?! I'm not impressed. It just looks like another functional language with a bunch of addons tacked on to make things "easier" or "for humans". Drop…

As a counterpoint: the example of the document containing blocks of code inside what looked more like a word document, to me, exactly explains visually what "designed for humans" means in this context, and I think it's well put.

While I like the idea, the problem with the demo is that it has about 10 files, with a bunch of small code blocks. What does it look like in a real-world application with 1000s lines in 100s of files?

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#27
Underwhelming so far. Literate programming sounds good, but sometimes it's too much text and you want to quickly scan a few lines of code and guess what's going on without reading that wall of text. I wonder if this is for regular programming or for occasional programmers (non-programmers really) to try "stuff" out.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#28
How is this significantly different from something like Light Table? (edit: didn't realize it was build by the people who built Light Table). It feels like a rehash of that + Python notebooks, with a bit of Xcode's playground thrown in.

Problem is that despite those tools being available, I literally never use them. Ever. Nor do I have a need for them.

I kind of like the idea of being able to find bits of code in a larger codebase in a document-like format. That's actually a pretty neat innovation here.

But beyond that, I don't think I'd use this (edit: per comment thread conversation below, I'm upgrading this to not being sure if I'd used this, but it's a maybe). I need an IDE that will help me through the Battle of Stalingrad, not a basic case like a police offer pulling someone over for a speeding ticket, which is what many of these kinds of next-gen UIs always seem to show.

Basic stuff is easy enough to accomplish right now. I don't need a new IDE to help me add a button to each row in a list any quicker than I currently can with existing tools, and I feel like a core problem with these types of efforts are that they start with basic cases and never really progress from there - many engineering problems simply do not reduce down to adding a button to a screen.

That all said - I think if you pivoted and built a wiki-like overlay that could be dropped over an arbitrary codebase (e.g. extrapolate out the document-like overlay over code to document and organize a codebase), holy crap, I would instantly pay money for that, especially if it was distributed team-friendly.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#29

Sorry, but what about this is "designed for humans"? What do the keywords mean? What's the language paradigm? Why do I want this when it's essentially coalescing a lot of APIs into a language that you've provided no spec for? Why would I want my language to work with slack?! I'm not impressed. It just looks like another functional language with a bunch of addons tacked on to make things "easier" or "for humans". Drop…

There's plenty of meat in the blog post, on the Github etc. I suspect it's for "humans" because it's literate, functional programming with a REPL and a natural approach to how data is managed. It's a lot more than just a functional programming language. When did it become cool to make uninformed claims about how worthless other people's work is?

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#30
I think there's potentially a lot of ways we can improve our programming environments. I like moon shots, people willing to explore new ways that are unconventional, approaching problems in different ways. I've followed Light Table and have been looking forward to seeing what Chris and friends come up with for Eve.

That said, this is feeling very grandiose. I'd like to understand more clearly where they see Eve being useful — and where Eve would not be useful. For example:

- how does one implement new algorithms? A simple example, how do I write Quicksort?

- can Eve be written in Eve?

Admittedly, I haven't thought about this nearly as much as the Eve team has. And perhaps I'm just lacking the required imagination at this point. That said, I'd like to see these types of questions addressed. There's nothing wrong with a tool that's useful in a particular set of circumstances. I'd like to know what the Eve team thinks those circumstances are.

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