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Eve: Programming designed for humans

programming.witheve.com

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Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#301

Post by quantumhobbit »

cghendrix wrote: post #292
hairy_man674 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java? What a horrible language.

How so? (Just genuinely curious as I always here this) I have asked the Java developers at my job if they have this common mindset and they don't seem to agree. I don't work with Java that much so I'm just honestly curious.

Java is a great virtual machine, a good collection of open source libraries, an ok language, and a nightmare collection of best practices and people who enforce them.

I don't have a beef with the language, it is the developers who have never programmed in another language and still think that FactoryBuilderImpls are a good idea. They have never ventured outside of an IDE, but insist that Python isn't a real programming language. I can program Java but I never want to program with "Java developers" if I can help it.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#302

Post by evincarofautumn »

ibdknox wrote: post #79
grzm wrote: post #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…

Check out our followup on that : http://programming.witheve.com/deepdives/whateveis.html 1) Eve is amazing at graph algorithms, not so much at writing quicksort. At the same time, you don't need to write quicksort in Eve - it has all of the things you'd get from something like a SQL database. In general, anything requiring strict sequential order will be just ok right now, but it turns out actually very few things do…

Is there a more precise description of the runtime semantics anywhere? “A variant of Datalog” is helpful but doesn’t say much.

For instance, it looks like every “commit” is essentially a sequence point that produces a step in the “fixpointer”—and from that terminology I guess Eve is Turing-complete, unlike Datalog? Do you test all patterns at every commit, or only those whose dependencies have changed? And if the latter, then how do you track such dependencies? Are they fully specified declaratively by queries? And what is the granularity—per term, per database?

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#303

Post by [deleted] »

jbclements wrote: post #150

I think that Eve is tackling the wrong problem. Allow me an analogy: "Bronk, the math designed for humans." Instead of dense algebraic expressions like "3x+49", you get to write "thrice the value of x plus 49." You may consider this a straw man, but I think that if you look hard at existing programming languages, you'll see that they are all designed for humans, and that the challenge in programming is in formulating…

[deleted]

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#304

Post by quantumhobbit »

pjc50 wrote: post #144
mkozlows wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your defense of literate program gives, as a defense, what I would think of as an attack on literate programming: Take this strawman for instance, how could you find the bug in the following code without the accompanying comment? // Print every other line of the array to the console for (var i = 0; i Because the problem with that is that now you have two competing sources of authority -- the comment, and the code.…

This is why comments that specify what the code does are a "code smell". Comments should explain things that are not obvious from the code. Comments should be things like // Note: PCI-DSS requirements apply below // Must check status register and FIFO to determine completion due to flaky hardware // Algorithm below is modified Knuth-Morris-Pratt // This is O(scary), but seems quick enough in practice. (Now, if someon…

I think the literate in literate programming is too formal. Maybe it should have been conversational programming.

The comments should be the things that you would tell a new team member during a pair programming session. You assume she knows what the syntax of the language is, but you don't assume she knows the business intent behind the code or the history of trial and error that led to its current state.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#305

Post by bdamm »

quantumhobbit wrote: post #301
cghendrix wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? (Just genuinely curious as I always here this) I have asked the Java developers at my job if they have this common mindset and they don't seem to agree. I don't work with Java that much so I'm just honestly curious.

Java is a great virtual machine, a good collection of open source libraries, an ok language, and a nightmare collection of best practices and people who enforce them. I don't have a beef with the language, it is the developers who have never programmed in another language and still think that FactoryBuilderImpls are a good idea. They have never ventured outside of an IDE, but insist that Python isn't a real programmi…

There's certainly no shortage of crummy developers layering on useless abstractions for no reason other than dogma. Don't worry, soon all those young and thoughtless developers will be coding in nothing but JavaScript, and the crufty Java die-hards will be pumping prime contracts to migrate old Java business engines well into retirement.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#306

Post by darkmighty »

xj9 wrote: post #294
darkmighty wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not unthinkable that a language, by design, facilitates or enforces precise definitions. As a far-fetched example, think of Lego. You can't "fail to compile" your Lego bricks. You have a finite selection of bricks (all clearly visible and usually available within arm's reach), and your job is to just lay one at a time. Given any brick, it's "obvious" to a human how it fits with other bricks. The worst you can do…

Not at all. Good tools are very important, and we shouldn't stop working to make them better. What I disagree with is the idea that good enough tools can replace engineers without them becoming General AIs. Until we get to that point, there will be systems that need to be built that only professionals are qualified to work on. I'm not saying that we need licensing boards or any of that nonsense, just that nobody is g…

I don't think it was implied good enough tools can replace qualified engineers. But I feel sometimes engineers don't realize that tools can not only be valuable for beginners (itself worthwhile, imo) but actually make experienced professionals more reliable (less error-prone) and work faster.

Taking the Lego analogy further, even if I, an experienced Lego builder, can construct a set entirely in my head, and write a correct assembly script, building it physically is likely faster and certainly less error-prone.

Those kinds of goals are hard to achieve with software (especially considering what we have is already pretty good!), but I think they're a worthy pursuit.

Examples of language/interface design that seem strictly beneficial: (regardless of experience or project)

- Showing the result of [valid] code changes as soon as possible (a feedback problem);

- Disallowing invalid expressions (a consistency problem);

- Displaying relevant components (functions, libraries, APIs, variables, etc) (a visibility problem);

- Bringing documentation closer to code (making functionality obvious)

Eve tries to tackle some of those challenges, especially the documentation problem and the visibility problem.

Solving those issues can both improve productivity and bring more people into programming.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#307

Post by chongli »

xj9 wrote: post #223
jimbokun wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You may consider this a straw man, but I think that if you look hard at existing programming languages, you'll see that they are all designed for humans, and that the challenge in programming is in formulating your thoughts in a precise fashion." Non-programmer: OK, Eve sounds great, so, I want to search for a Slack message. How would I do that? Eve-programmer: Obviously, it's just: search @slack [#message from body…

If we can eliminate software engineering as a profession our work will be done. There will be nothing left for humans to do, because at that point we will have invented a General AI. Up until that point, software engineering will be a well paid job. I really don't understand this attitude that everyone should be a programmer or that programming should be easy. It isn't easy. Obviously, we should remove unnecessary fr…

nobody expects everyone to be a physicist or chemical engineer. Specialization is a good thing.

The difference with software engineers is that they have the power to build their own tools; physicists and chemical engineers largely don't, unless they themselves are also software engineers. You aren't going to use knowledge of chemistry to build general software but you can always find a use for software engineering in any domain. This puts it in the same category as literacy and mathematics, rather than strictly being a specialization pursued toward its own end.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#308

Post by roller »

ibdknox wrote: post #170
jbclements wrote: post #150

I think that Eve is tackling the wrong problem. Allow me an analogy: "Bronk, the math designed for humans." Instead of dense algebraic expressions like "3x+49", you get to write "thrice the value of x plus 49." You may consider this a straw man, but I think that if you look hard at existing programming languages, you'll see that they are all designed for humans, and that the challenge in programming is in formulating…

There's still code here, the text is just for people, so I wonder if this is maybe a misunderstanding. The language presented is a variant of datalog and is as formal as any other language. If you're curious in the semantics, they boil down to Dedalus [1]. As a simple example of that, here's a clock: http://play.witheve.com/#/examples/clock.eve [1]: https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-...

For an introduction to Dedalus with less reading, Peter Alvaro's 2015 Strange Loop talk was fantastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Aa4PivG0g

---

Edit: Actually Chris Granger gave an Eve talk at the same conference. It's interesting to see how Eve has evolved since.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V1ynVyud4M

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#309

Post by anewhnaccount »

dgudkov wrote: post #299
cmontella wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, we agree completely with this view. We tried going down this path [1], and ultimately concluded it was the wrong direction, for many of the reasons you point out here. But Eve is a full programming language. The "humane" aspects are not about making the language more ambiguous, but about changing the focus of tooling from the machine to the human. It's about things as simple as Unicode support for language…

>changing the focus of tooling from the machine to the human >It's about debugging tools that work with you to solve a problem. >we want humane tooling I know how hard it is to explain what exactly your product does. I myself constantly struggle with this. Eve is an interesting concept that is worth a closer look and discussion. But you guys need to learn how to explain its benefits using a less ambiguous language.

Well the linked page and videos explain the benefits of the current release pretty well. They should take less than 30 minutes to view. I think part of the reason they use ambiguous language is they see this programming language as the first step in achieving a series of more ambitious goals. They've also been writing specific prototypes which they also believe work toward these goals for the last two years.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#310

Post by imaginenore »

jbclements wrote: post #150

I think that Eve is tackling the wrong problem. Allow me an analogy: "Bronk, the math designed for humans." Instead of dense algebraic expressions like "3x+49", you get to write "thrice the value of x plus 49." You may consider this a straw man, but I think that if you look hard at existing programming languages, you'll see that they are all designed for humans, and that the challenge in programming is in formulating…

I agree. I also think something like Unity3D came a lot closer to solving "programming for non-programmers". You can create quite complex projects without writing a single line of code.
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