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Eve Version 0

chris-granger.com

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Re: Eve Version 0

#41

Post by mtrimpe »

mej10 wrote: post #17
fortytw2 wrote: post #2

Interesting ideas, very different, but still reminds me a lot of Light Table (probably because they have the same author :p) Seems to be built on a rather interesting Rust + TypeScript stack? Can't say I've seen that one before - anyone have experience with such a stack?

The stack choice is especially interesting since I thought they were big fans of Clojure. I would like to hear their rationale for Rust/TypeScript over Clojure/ClojureScript (or Clojure/Javascript). EDIT: typo

@jamii: For some odd reason you seem to be hell-banned. I couldn't find anything in your comment history to suggest why though :s

@mej10: Turn on showdead if you want to see jamii's response to your question.

Re: Eve Version 0

#42

Post by shubhamjain »

Wow. This is something that I had pondering over the past. A major frustration I notices with people using excel is Data-Entry coupled with horizontal scrolling. I was sketching a app with cells that are like MongoDB like collections and computations that can defined elsewhere.

Although, people have called making a generalised CRUD software, nearly impossible task, but I bet that, in that domain lies a room for an innovative conceptualisation of the problem. Maybe, in the next decade, we can see software with which people don't have to look for freelancers just to build a Data-Entry App. Good luck, Chris!

Re: Eve Version 0

#43

Post by nekopa »

sanxiyn wrote: post #15

I always thought BOOM was a very cool system, so it's nice to see something influenced by it. I find it interesting that BOOM emphasized scalability, but Eve seems completely uninterested in that aspect.

Maybe that's because they are trying to target 'non-programmers', so scale probably is not an issue for them. But that may hurt them if they want 'serious' programmers to take note.

For me, I want to try it out because there are a million little things I would like to do just for myself, not at web scale...

Re: Eve Version 0

#44

Post by mkozlows »

dgreensp wrote: post #14
mkozlows wrote: post #10

So after they didn't exactly revolutionize the IDE with Light Table, and pivoted to revolutionizing programming, they seem to have kind of come around to revolutionizing... groupware? Which at least seems more plausible, as it ought to be possible to make a better groupware application than Lotus Notes. I think the larger implication is: Programming tools are actually pretty good, and the larger process of programmin…

I get the opposite message, which is that programming tools and the process of programming are so bad, it's hard to get a computer to do a simple task for you without tearing your hair out, never mind building a UI. A better IDE (basically a better text editor) doesn't even scratch the surface.

The thing is, it's easy to say something is hard. Programming is definitely hard!

The question is: Is it hard essentially, or is it hard accidentally? That is, can you remove unnecessary complexity from programming and suddenly it'll become easy?

That was the proposition behind first LightTable, and then Eve as originally conceived. But neither of them really found a satisfying answer, a way to say "hey, for making your web app or whatever, if you throw away your existing stuff and use this tool/process, now it's super-easy."

That implies heavily that a lot of the complexity and difficulty is essential. Not all of it -- things will get easier and better over time, as they have over the last ten years -- but enough so that blowing it all up and starting from scratch isn't likely to lead to wins.

Re: Eve Version 0

#45

Post by andy_ppp »

webjprgm wrote: post #22
dgreensp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the opposite message, which is that programming tools and the process of programming are so bad, it's hard to get a computer to do a simple task for you without tearing your hair out, never mind building a UI. A better IDE (basically a better text editor) doesn't even scratch the surface.

Yeah. They said for doing simple things rather than building complex systems the current tools are not very convenient. I find it really useful to use Ruby's built-in CSV library to process data for spreadsheets then visualize it with a graph in Numbers. I pull data from copy-paste tables, extract from Sqlite databases embedded in applications, etc. But for something like scanning Facebook friends as they suggested I…

And you end up with Moriarty taking over the ship? ;-)

Re: Eve Version 0

#46

Post by slantedview »

Really excited about this work and interested to see where it goes. Reading this:

"even many of them expressed wanting to automate processes or bring a bunch of different types of information together"

...makes me wonder: are we just talking about a better ITTT type of thing?

Re: Eve Version 0

#47

Post by dalacv »

shubhamjain wrote: post #42

Wow. This is something that I had pondering over the past. A major frustration I notices with people using excel is Data-Entry coupled with horizontal scrolling. I was sketching a app with cells that are like MongoDB like collections and computations that can defined elsewhere. Although, people have called making a generalised CRUD software, nearly impossible task, but I bet that, in that domain lies a room for an in…

take a look at Oracle APEX and KnackHQ.com

Re: Eve Version 0

#48

Post by MrDosu »

nekopa wrote: post #39
MrDosu wrote: post #32

I think the major problem with this approach is trying to solve the general Problem. These graphical abstractions can be excellent when tailored to a domain. We are shipping a product right now that abstracts the database away through a little graphical graph editor like this one to transform it into the domain language of the people (non programmers) that are consuming the data. It is quite excellent.

Can you explain more, or even share your project? It sounds quite interesting.

Unfortunately I cannot share code.

It is actually quite simple. There is a graphical designer that connects to a data warehouse. There someone defines a graph like structure with nodes that contain a collection of data rows and relations to other nodes of data rows. This results in a library that you can interop with in existing software tools of the customer to query that graph model naturally (Stuff like Location('airport')=>Car('sedane')=>RentalHistory). It's basically a glorified ORM mapper with a graphical programming language for the codegen of the objects to produce a kind of data DSL.

Re: Eve Version 0

#49

Post by exelius »

mkozlows wrote: post #10

So after they didn't exactly revolutionize the IDE with Light Table, and pivoted to revolutionizing programming, they seem to have kind of come around to revolutionizing... groupware? Which at least seems more plausible, as it ought to be possible to make a better groupware application than Lotus Notes. I think the larger implication is: Programming tools are actually pretty good, and the larger process of programmin…

This seems like more of a competitor for something like WebMethods -- a simplified way of programming complex business logic. With most business logic code, the hard part is actually figuring out what the business wants the logic to be and communicating with business stakeholders; and those are tasks poorly suited to most developers.

There is nothing technically difficult about these problems; and it's work that's really more suited to a business analyst anyway. While developers should obviously check their logic to make sure it's sound; gathering the requirements is 90% of the work in these situations.

Anyway, that market seems a lot easier to compete in than the straight up dev tools market. Dev tools are so personalized, with every person/team/project/company having different needs and requirements that it seems like the only way to succeed would be with a niche product (which naturally limits the scale of your success).

Re: Eve Version 0

#50

Post by jamii »

The change of focus is perhaps hard to understand without more context. Basically, there are two really different modes of programming:

Most of what we see on HN is about building applications, servers, websites etc. Big, monolithic things that take weeks to years and are deployed to somewhere else and used by lots of people. Most programming tools are built for this kind of work, where the time between writing the code and actually using it is days or months.

But the people we want to make programming accessible to are mostly knowledge workers. Their work is characterised by a mixture of manual work and automation, throw-away code and tools rather than applications. It's better supported by Excel, SQL, shell scripting etc than by the big languages and IDEs.

We realised that we can do much more good focusing on that kind of programming.

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