Eve Version 0 • Hacker News Board

Re: Eve Version 0

#51

Post by dman » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 5:10 PM UTC

MrDosu wrote: post #48

nekopa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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('…

What is the domain in question? Have you run into issues where the power users who are non programmers want to do more programming like tasks over time to exert more control?

Re: Eve Version 0

#52

Post by cmontella » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 5:10 PM UTC

MrDosu wrote: post #36

danso wrote: post #35

> In order to accomplish that, we do need a way to describe processes. We need a way to "program." But switching the goal from building applications to analyzing and communicating information changes everything. Our current programming tools are awful thinking tools. Instead, they were designed to build complex systems. How much effort does it take to write a program to scan through your facebook friends and check to…

I would argue that an API is easier to learn by several factors regardless of how complex it is compared to the abstract reasoning and modelling skills to actually transform the faced problems into a precise model.

I respectfully disagree. People who are not programmers use abstract reasoning and modelling skills all the time in their daily lives. They more than have the skills to solve this problem: You have a list of friends and where they are, you have your own location. Find the list of friends that are near your location, and send an alert (text, e-mail, whatever). How hard is that?

There is absolutely no inherent complexity to this problem.

Re: Eve Version 0

#53

Post by dominotw » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 5:11 PM UTC

Is anyone using LightTable on a daily basis?

I sponsored the kickstarter but never really followed up on what happened to it.

Re: Eve Version 0

#54

Post by crisnoble » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 5:16 PM UTC

toby wrote: post #37

danso wrote: post #35

> In order to accomplish that, we do need a way to describe processes. We need a way to "program." But switching the goal from building applications to analyzing and communicating information changes everything. Our current programming tools are awful thinking tools. Instead, they were designed to build complex systems. How much effort does it take to write a program to scan through your facebook friends and check to…

Agree -- if Facebook had an "export my friend list to Excel" button, then plenty of non-programmers could perform this task using existing tools. I read the tutorial and I am sort of struggling to see what benefit this would give someone who was already an Excel power-user.

An excel power-user is indistinguishable from a programmer. If you are an excel power-user, and don't think you are a programmer, learn javascript, http://eloquentjavascript.net/.

Re: Eve Version 0

#55

Post by Fomite » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 5:20 PM UTC

jamii wrote: post #50

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 c…

This is a really helpful perspective. For example, I've started referring to myself as a "user" of Python rather than a programmer.

Re: Eve Version 0

#56

Post by Fomite » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 5:22 PM UTC

dcre wrote: post #4

aerovistae wrote: post #3

Bugs me when people choose a name that's already being used for something much better known.

You mean the game? Not sure there's much potential for confusion.

When I clicked this article, I was genuinely hoping it was about CCP deciding to release some of the early/foundational code for Eve Online.

Re: Eve Version 0

#57

Post by MrDosu » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 5:27 PM UTC

dman wrote: post #51

MrDosu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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('…

What is the domain in question? Have you run into issues where the power users who are non programmers want to do more programming like tasks over time to exert more control?

The domain is (non technical) government data analysts.

Yes we ran into this a lot with people wanting more control. There are several hooks and extension points in the software. Basically every graphical element has the equivalent of being replaced with an actual code file that you can substitute at runtime. This gets never used by the customer, usually we just provide extension libraries that abstract the concepts of whatever they want to do.

Re: Eve Version 0

#58

Post by skybrian » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

mkozlows wrote: post #44

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.

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 y…

There's certainly a lot of accidental complexity that comes from lack of standardization. For example, think about how complicated character sets were to deal with before Unicode. Then compare the mess of different kinds of Unicode encodings to standardizing on UTF-8. Or take file formats before XML/JSON/Protobufs. Or, going further back, floating point before IEEE 754.

I agree that blowing it all up is not a win, which is why accidental complexity goes away only gradually, and it's partially a process of hiding it rather than removing it, with lots of politics along the way.

Re: Eve Version 0

#59

Post by BjoernKW » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

The way I understand it Eve is aiming to be both a better Excel and a better Lotus Notes. I think its creators are still on to something.

These tools are often ridiculed and their use by non-programmers for creating business tools is often frowned upon but they allow business users to quickly create flexible, makeshift solutions to their problems. Not every business problem needs to be solved by a complex, cumbersome JEE application and an expensive application server.

While Lotus Notes apps certainly look awful and feel clunky most of the times there is a certain elegance to being able to quickly whip up a solution to a business problem or an urgent information need without having to go through a lengthy collection of requirements and approval process first. The same applies to Excel spreadsheets: They're a great tool for iterating quickly and getting a certain class of jobs done. Something like a REPL for non-programmers.

Re: Eve Version 0

#60

Post by cmontella » Mon, Aug 17, 2015, 5:30 PM UTC

tzakrajs wrote: post #11

I still have no idea what this is after reading the blog.

Thanks for taking a read. Chris stated in the blog post that this release is basically "a database with an IDE". Our vision for Eve is that people will use it as a tool for thinking and then communicating the results of that thought process.

Take a look at Excel, for instance. Excel is the most widely used programming language by non-programmers simply because of its dead-simple programming abstraction: a grid of cells than can hold data and reference each other with formulae. History has shown anybody can get this.

People have taken this surprisingly far, but there are still drastic limitations to what you can build this way (how do you manage state, UI, external access to APIs and data?). Trying to make programming in its current form simpler is a dead-end; as a task, programming has built up too much incidental complexity over the years. Instead, we are approaching it from the Excel angle of trying a completely different abstraction, which (we hope) will attract the same kind of attention from non-programmers as Excel has.