Eve: Programming designed for humans • Hacker News Board

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#361

Post by alkonaut » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 12:53 PM UTC

loeber wrote: post #109

I like the look of this project, and it's in many ways inspiring, but here's my cynical take: I think that Eve won't be conducive to creating applications beyond a few hundred lines of code -- after that, the "human-friendly" programming paradigm becomes an obstacle to production. Once people actually understand how the code works, the document style becomes superfluous. I suspect that Eve will be a great learning to…

A ton of programming is done in Access and Excel. Perhaps most business calculation and presentation formulas are done in those "integrated" environments, and not in languages as we "programmers" know them.

I can see this fitting a niche between Excel and "normal" programming. That niche might be a lot bigger than we think.

I think we may be a bit blinded as regular programmers to who is actually a programmer, and where programming happens.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#362

Post by mshenfield » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 1:05 PM UTC

mkozlows wrote: post #36

ibdknox wrote: post #2

Hi All! Many of the folks here have been following us for a long time and we're really excited to finally pull everything together to show you all where our research has taken us. Eve is still very early [1], but it shows a lot of promise and I think this community especially will be interested in the ideas we've put together. As many of you were also big Light Table supporters, we wanted to talk about Eve's relation…

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.…

Eve places the source of truth clearly in the document surrounding the code. The code disagrees with the description, the code should be changed unless there is some evidence in git that the code functions as intended.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#363

Post by stungeye » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 1:06 PM UTC

As a programming instructor the Eve demo video gave me goosebumps. The emphasis on prose+code, world=data, and the discoverability afforded by the inspector are of particular interest to me.

Our current learning stack for folks with zero coding experience is Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu) to Processing (https://processing.org) to Java.* I'll be watching the Eve project carefully to see how it might fit into our intro to programming path.

*If these intro students continue to our full program they learn C#, SQL, PHP & JS/HTML too.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#364

Post by nickpsecurity » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 1:11 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #322

ljw1001 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smalltalk was very consciously, and conscientiously, designed for humans.

I did Smalltalk in school and once you peel away a few layers it doesn't feel like it was designed for humans at all. Perl is also said be designed for humans but takes a very different approach.

What did you feel was bad about Smalltalk?

As for Perl, it was hacked together to automate some work Larry Walls was doing on BLACKER VPN at TRW.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#365

Post by Pharylon » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 1:17 PM UTC

arcbyte wrote: post #355

FrancoDiaz wrote: post #227

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. Should languages create higher-level abstractions to allow humans to reason about programs more efficiently? Yes! But that's not what this environment is about. I think you'r…

>Think about how we program. We are given requirements and we noodle about it for a bit and start writing some code that is nowhere close to what the final source will be. That is not how one writes software...

That's exactly how I do it. Play around with the problem, and once I've messed with it a bit, take a step back and plan out the right way to do it. Sometimes my "proof of concept" doodling will have salvageable bits. Very rarely (or if it was an easy requirement) the play code will be close to ready. Sometimes, I have to throw it all away. Such is life.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#366

Post by thallukrish » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 1:18 PM UTC

I feel to make programming easier, we need a assistant (intelligent in whatever sense you call it :-) that can figure out the 'intent' of the code by reading it and be able to point out bugs by learning from millions of source code in Github.

I wrote in this article

https://medium.com/@thallukrish/debug-assistant-2aa37ac13ca5...

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#367

Post by coldnebo » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 1:24 PM UTC

king_magic wrote: post #295

FrancoDiaz wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate being preachy, but Problem is that despite those tools being available, I literally never use them. Ever. Nor do I have a need for them. You don't know what you don't know.

I never said I've never used them. I've used them and decided they were not useful for me based on those experiences. So no, in this case, I do in fact know.

Except you describe the kinds of problems you typically solve (placing a button in a row) which are the smallest/simplest case of the problems that we're talking about, so it seems that you might not know about the problems that other devs face in composition of business logic, layering of complex build chains, etc or see a reason why solutions to these problems would ever be useful. Fair enough, but then you probably aren't the target market, so it doesn't make much sense to ask for a pivot to something else.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#368

Post by pluma » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 1:26 PM UTC

edem wrote: post #85

LightTable was not updated for a year now. I actually backed it and now the IDE seems abandoned never to reach 1.0. I've lost trust in the developers and I won't recommend Eve to anyone because of the fear that they will abandon it as well and start chasing the next big dream.

Just for context: 0.8.0 and 0.7.0 were both release near the end of the year with one year between them[0] (2015 and 2014 respectively). If there is a 0.9.0 coming up I'd expect it in late November or December this year, accordingly.

However there has been barely any progress[1] on the GitHub repo since February (compared to the previous years), the last commit was 20 days ago and even before that there were typically several days in between commits. So it's fair to say the IDE seems abandoned.

However, the LightTable devs have stated that they see Eve as the logical continuation of the idea behind LightTable[2]. While the promise that "LightTable will continue to go on strong" seems to be the typical startup pivot lie I don't think their behaviour is quite as erratic as you make it seem.

By the way, I'm also a Kickstarter backer and I have the shirt to prove it. I was hoping for a nicer JavaScript IDE and would have been very satisfied with their original promise but I can see the appeal of going a step further. The move from LT to Eve feels a lot like a bait and switch to those who just wanted a better IDE for the languages they currently get to work with.

[0]: http://lighttable.com/blog/

[1]: https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/graphs/contributors...

[2]: http://www.chris-granger.com/2014/10/01/beyond-light-table/

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#369

Post by stevekrouse » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 1:56 PM UTC

stungeye wrote: post #363

As a programming instructor the Eve demo video gave me goosebumps. The emphasis on prose+code, world=data, and the discoverability afforded by the inspector are of particular interest to me. Our current learning stack for folks with zero coding experience is Scratch ( https://scratch.mit.edu ) to Processing ( https://processing.org ) to Java.* I'll be watching the Eve project carefully to see how it might fit into ou…

Your curricular path sounds similar to the one we use at The Coding Space (https://thecodingspace.com). Might I suggest Woof (http://woofjs.com) as alternative JavaScript graphics framework to transition students from Scratch to text based programming?

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#370

Post by king_magic » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 1:58 PM UTC

coldnebo wrote: post #367

king_magic wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said I've never used them. I've used them and decided they were not useful for me based on those experiences. So no, in this case, I do in fact know.

Except you describe the kinds of problems you typically solve (placing a button in a row) which are the smallest/simplest case of the problems that we're talking about, so it seems that you might not know about the problems that other devs face in composition of business logic, layering of complex build chains, etc or see a reason why solutions to these problems would ever be useful. Fair enough, but then you probabl…

I really think you guys are misunderstanding my comment. Placing a button in a row is not a complex thing and frankly not something I spend a lot of time doing or worrying about. Look, it's just not. Does it require a new type of tool? IMO, no, it really doesn't.

I'm quite aware of the kinds of problems "other devs face", and they are far more complex than plopping a glorified view inside of another view and hooking up an action when someone taps it.

I simply do not see enough in Eve to convince me that it will significantly help with much more complicated things - things like what you describe - composition of complex business logic, layering complex build chains, etc - and here's a few other common things I don't see it providing significantly new and interesting support for:

- creation and management of complex data models and how they map down to SQL or NoSQL persistence - orchestrating complex, multithreaded processes - API design and management - cloud infrastructure architecture, design and management - container design and management - transaction processing - analytics

etc...

Could something like Eve progress to encompass those types of activities? Possibly (and frankly I'd love to see it - imagine something like Eve's UI for seamlessly managing infrastructure across Azure, AWS, Google Cloud and on-prem infrastructure - that would be amazing). But IMO, it's starting by solving the wrong kinds of problems by reinventing the wheel (new language).

Like I've said before, I don't need or want a new IDE or language to help me with trivial problems. I want tools that help with the harder stuff.