If their primary focus is business/knowledge workers, why wasn't their release targetted to Windows?
Eve Version 0
71–80 of 195 posts
Re: Eve Version 0
#72If their primary focus is business/knowledge workers, why wasn't their release targetted to Windows?
It is kind of a pain to build on Windows right now, but it is a supported platform and we will eventually have pre-built binaries.
Re: Eve Version 0
#73The 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…
> 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.
They do, which is both great and terrible. They're powerful and easy to get started with, but therein lies the danger.
When used to quickly whip something up they're great, but when those things grow or end up being relied upon they're no better than the hack that the CEOs kids friend who is 'good with computers' produces.
So, since they're both useful and dangerous, are there things we can do?
Perhaps a spreadsheet that allows some form of testing? Are there simple tests we could start to encourage people to use? When I've used spreadsheets for some financial things, I know that if I increase one cell, I expect another to increase (for example). I know certain combinations of inputs that should result in certain outputs.
Also, perhaps a clear path from spreadsheet -> application? Often intermediate values are displayed somewhere, so could a spreadsheet app lead someone to naming them all (typically they'll have a 'variable name' just to the left of them).
edit - I should really have read the article first, but I think a focus on making things testable is important.
Re: Eve Version 0
#74The 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…
Was there a problem inherent to building large applications that you found intractible, or is the shift solely due to focusing on entry-level accessibility?
The shift is primarily due to the fact that relatively few people seemed to want to build large applications, including ourselves.
There are definitely some differences between building large apps and these more communication/analysis tasks, but we think the foundation itself applies to both. The language is an adaptation of the Dedalus[1] semantics, which the BOOM lab did some amazing things in distributed systems with [2]. If it can build a clone of hadoop, chances are it can build most things. We've built a number of our compilers in Eve, several of our editors were bootstrapped, we've built numerous examples, most recently a complete clone of Foursquare. Before we'd want others to try and do that though, we need our tooling to get a bit better. We expect that the Eve editor will get there eventually kind of out of necessity - we're going to bootstrap a lot of it this time too, starting with the compiler.
[1]: http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/datalog2011-dedalus.pdf
Re: Eve Version 0
#75At a glance, it reminds me of what MS Access was (is?)... or could have been if MS hadn't ignored it to death.
So many people (myself included) were/are incredibly empowered by that program, and I still have a fond place in my heart for Access, as it was my bridge from Excel macros to "real programming".
Hopefully Eve doesn't get DabbleDB'd... the world really needs a modern MS Access!
Re: Eve Version 0
#76At a glance, it reminds me of what MS Access was (is?)... or could have been if MS hadn't ignored it to death.
So many people (myself included) were/are incredibly empowered by that program, and I still have a fond place in my heart for Access, as it was my bridge from Excel macros to "real programming".
Hopefully Eve doesn't get DabbleDB'd... the world really needs a modern MS Access!
Re: Eve Version 0
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 complexi…
This is just not true. You cannot just give a smart person with common sense some pages of API docu and suddenly they are software architects. This takes years of experience to do. What you can do is be a code monkey and solve a very specific small problem space that an architect has assigned to you.
You are supporting cmontellas point, not negating it.
His point is that the inherent complexity of the problem is fairly trivial, and he stated it concisely. And you are correctly pointing out that to realize the solution to the problem requires a great amount of work and expertise. Meaning, the actual programming has a great deal of additional (accidental) complexity.
Re: Eve Version 0
#78If their primary focus is business/knowledge workers, why wasn't their release targetted to Windows?
It is kind of a pain to build on Windows right now, but it is a supported platform and we will eventually have pre-built binaries.
Thanks, have been looking forward to testing this as I am essentially your target demographic.
Re: Eve Version 0
#79Bad name choice. There are already too many better known things called "Eve".
Re: Eve Version 0
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is jamii's reply to this dead? It is very informative and on-topic.
It accidentally triggered a spam filter. Sorry; we fixed it.
Thanks! It's a testament to how rarely things go wrong that seeing such a good comment ranked so low was so surprising to me.