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zenobit256 | 9 years ago

In what way is this more "humane"?

Programming languages by design are for human consumption. In what way is this "special" or "designed" for them?

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bloaf|9 years ago

Here, I think you are wrong. I strongly suspect that while the high-level features of programming languages are chosen for human consumption, the implementation details and tooling are often chosen arbitrarily, or for machine-convenience. For example, I don't generally consider language environments where the leading white space on a line matters, or languages where trailing white space matters to be "designed for humans." Computers might be good at counting spaces, but we're mediocre at visually estimating the width of a blank area in text. Such an environment asks the user to develop more machine-like skills rather than attempting to accommodate their weaknesses.

woah|9 years ago

Or it asks the user to use tabs? Or an editor that inserts spaces when you press tab? Indentation has never been a stumbling block for anyone but the most junior of programmers.

Pyxl101|9 years ago

It does more of the heavy lifting automatically. For example, rather than having to explicitly build a data structure to keep track of events that have happened, or build some message bus to receive and react to them, Eve allows you to express the fact that you want to react to them, and its runtime takes care of the rest.

How well this scales and remains available, well, that's an implementation challenge, but the user interface looks very convenient. It is potentially a higher level of abstraction over current "high level programming", just as high level programming was over assembly.

wyager|9 years ago

What you describe is normally handled by any number of perfectly good libraries. The selling point here seems to be "we've thrown a bunch of random libraries together in the standard library", which isn't a super compelling argument to me.

agumonkey|9 years ago

How I see it, languages are only one projection of what a program is. The missing part is what confuses "normal" people (unlike people who spent long hours learning how to map things in their head). This project reminds me of AOP, old IBM multidimensional orthogonal concerns projects. You can go back and forth between different views of the program, that helps tremendously.