Eve: Programming designed for humans

Post by scottmf » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 5:09 AM UTC

westoncb wrote: post #279

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…

It's unfortunate the parent is the top comment here. There's a common thing that happens when a new idea shows up that doesn't easily fit into existing categories:(most) people give it a cursory look over, and then decide it's just another instance of boring category X. This is especially common in discussions about humanizing programming. I think it's partly because people are invested in the current way of doing th…

Post by wvenable » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 5:34 AM UTC

dancek wrote: post #146

While this is a very early version, something like it will eventually put most programmers out of work. Probably it'll be another language/tool and it won't be very soon, but at some point writing trivial software will actually be trivial. It's ironic, being a programmer that automates things that people used to do manually, and kind of doing good but leaving someone unemployed. How fitting it will be to suddenly bec…

Post by sanderjd » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 5:38 AM UTC

cmontella wrote: post #281

sanderjd wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "ignore the symbols and just read the words" idea is part of Ruby's promise as well. In practice, I don't personally find it very satisfying, because it's easy to write things that read like they do one thing, but actually do something else. So you have to train yourself to ignore what it says until you figure out what it does . I think the better metric to optimize for is how easy it is to go from seeing a piece…

> I think the better metric to optimize for is how easy it is to go from seeing a piece of code for the first time to having a mental model for what its runtime behavior will be Actually yes, we've seen some evidence of this. In one instance, I was demonstrating the syntax of Eve to someone who really only had experience programming HTML, and he was able to point out a bug in my code without even running the program.…

Post by posterboy » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 5:52 AM UTC

eternalban wrote: post #209

posterboy wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use mnemonics, because we can't remember numbers as well, but to the compiler, addresses are pretty much like names.

It's a bit more than that. Function names are precisely encapsulation of the intent of the function. And unlike comments, function names are not subject to rot. Also addresses are not like names. As with names in general, a name can refer to more than one object. (Consider modules, for example.)

Post by LoSboccacc » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 6:01 AM UTC

_mhyx wrote: post #261

avereveard wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so basically Java?

Good tooling, easy to understand, unambiguous? Sounds like Java. Why can't people just use Java?