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Eve: Programming designed for humans

programming.witheve.com

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Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#391

Post by d--b »

A few comments.

1. Black box

By hiding away the complexities of schema design and information indexing, Eve cannot be accepted as a proper framework for any professional project. As soon as performance starts to be a problem, there is nothing one can do to help. In the same vein, not having local variables means there is a whole lot of small things you can't do. Doing flappy bird is one thing, I doubt you can make a fast Tetris with this. Rotating pieces will be a nightmare. I mean, even in Eve, you HAD to add "functions" like cosine and sine, just for your demos. If you can't define these functions, you kind of proved that Eve was incomplete...

2. For humans?

I personally don't think that eve makes it particularly easier for human to program. I mean, this is a type of programming that is not new. You can do eve-like programs in any language easily. In c#, you can do an Eve engine with 1 big list of dynamically typed records and Linq queries on it. Yet, it's not the way people like to program. The only real world example that I can think of is D3, which in many ways shares the eve search / apply / bind model. And D3 is pretty great, but many people have found it hard to grasp, and it is likely that the limitation of the approach are ok when dealing with graphics, and much less so when deal with general purpose programming language.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#392

Post by gnud »

This looks interesting! But it terrifies me how you seem to be programming against the production app/database in the video.

I get that this is the early days of the project, but I would love to see some information about how your program is actually stored/compiled, how you can version control and deploy it, and how you can interact with files/databases outside the 'eve' universe.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#393

Post by taeric »

darkmighty wrote: post #278
xj9 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

You would be surprised how non obvious Legos actually are to people not familiar with them already.

This is akin to thinking doors are intrinsically intuitive. There is actually a ton of training that kids go through for that "intuition."

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#394

Post by spaceknarf »

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…

> Now, if someone lets me put images in comments, that would be amazing. Good for state transition diagrams and random scribbles

That's exactly what JetBrains MPS (https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/) does. Even better: the state transition diagram is the code. Some of my colleagues are playing with it - not sure if it's used in production yet.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#395

Post by PeterisP »

zubairq wrote: post #356
tigershark wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a dsl, you can write easily something equivalent or even better in other languages, but doesn't really tell you anything about the underlying language. What is the difference with: let messages = search slack_message body to me this version seems more readable without the square brackets, hash and @ distractions. Why as a non programmer I would ever want to know when to use @ instead of # and when to put…

No, it's more than just saying let messages = search, as in eve this is being run whenever search changes, whereas in other languages it is run when you explicitly call it

Now this sounds very dangerous - one of big problems of declarative style is that it's too easy to accidentally build a system that does much more than you intended, totally killing performance.

There is a very, very big difference between running a search once and re-running it whenever search changes; if you want it one way then you definitely don't want it the other way and that would be a serious problem.

That's not a "in this language" issue, you can do both ways in any language, but this choice you made should be (a) explicit and (b) obvious, which it doesn't seem to be in this case; where a reader can reasonably expect the search to be run once.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#396

Post by zubairq »

PeterisP wrote: post #395
zubairq wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's more than just saying let messages = search, as in eve this is being run whenever search changes, whereas in other languages it is run when you explicitly call it

Now this sounds very dangerous - one of big problems of declarative style is that it's too easy to accidentally build a system that does much more than you intended, totally killing performance. There is a very, very big difference between running a search once and re-running it whenever search changes; if you want it one way then you definitely don't want it the other way and that would be a serious problem. That's…

Actually in Eve it is explicit, there is bind and then there is commit:

http://docs.witheve.com/handbook/bind/

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#397

Post by tripzilch »

tluyben2 wrote: post #342
gugagore wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your message could still be effective (or even more effective) without putting down "religious people".

He said religious fanatics who are also people but a niche inside a religion. What is wrong with that as it rings through? Both defend something mostly without bases with extreme vigor and energy.

Yes! I program PHP because I feel it fills a spiritual void for me.

I'm a Zend-Buddhist.

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#398

Post by erikpukinskis »

kybernetikos wrote: post #379

I absolutely loved the semantic wiki stuff that was shown towards the end of the "In search of tomorrow" video. This seems fairly different to that system. Is there a write up/talk about why you changed? Is there anything like that semantic wiki thing available for me to use? https://youtu.be/VZQoAKJPbh8?t=46m20s

Yeah, in all of the demos they've put out, that's the one I think they could slap a domain name on and end up with something as big and useful as wikipedia. Just the documents and the query language and the "cards" or whatever.

I guess Eve is their prototype of the back end for that?

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#399

Post by zubairq »

brianwawok wrote: post #205
ibdknox wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to do literate programming in traditional languages is pretty crappy [1]. Some heroic effort ended up having to go into this release as well so things aren't as commented as we wanted, but that will improve. There are a few files that are pretty good though [2]. Our Eve source on the other hand is wonderfully literate and it's been a really great experience. Here's the code that makes the inspector work [3]. […

I only looked at 2.. but honestly, that looked like the kind of code I got delivered from offshore teams. 3 lines of comments saying what a for loop will do, then 1 line to do the for loop. I would -1 most of that on a code review, and ask for comments that just describe what the code is doing to be removed.

I can show you plenty of crappy code delivered from local teams too, especially myself!

Re: Eve: Programming designed for humans

#400

Post by zubairq »

king_magic wrote: post #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 l…

Actually it is the other way around. Apple Playgrounds in XCode and SWIFT were inspired by Light Table. Chris Lattner, the creator of SWIFT even publicly acklowledges Light Table as inspiration on his blog:

http://www.nondot.org/sabre/

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