1. 45

This announcement is about the Eve programming language.

Previous Lobsters stories about Eve:

    1. 7

      Very disappointing. It was one of very few projects that was aiming to push beyond incrementalism and advance computing in the spirit of Engelbart and Kay.

      I think it was a fluke that it got funded even for this period of time. IIRC, they got some VC money. No matter what VCs say, they just can’t be interested in long term improvements without a clear way to make a profit.

      1. 2

        I think it was a fluke that it got funded even for this period of time. IIRC, they got some VC money. No matter what VCs say, they just can’t be interested in long term improvements without a clear way to make a profit.

        VC investments are bets. And I can totally see betting on something that could be a very fresh approach to getting started with computing. Programming languages might not be a viable business, but programming environments on the other hand certainly are.

        1. 2

          Sure, I agree, but I think Eve was about inventing a programming paradigm, not even a language, let alone an environment (the environment was sort of a consequence). From what I gleaned from their blog, it looked very much like a research project: they went through heaps of re-implementations and changed the programming paradigm a couple of times. It’s tough to get a good return on a research project in a couple of years!

          1. 1

            While that might be true, I’m pretty sure they didn’t get funded for researching the paradigm. If they had succeeded, they would end up with a product.

            The apparent problem for me is that interest in short-term gains and research don’t really mix.

            1. 2

              The apparent problem for me is that interest in short-term gains and research don’t really mix.

              Short-term thinking dominates both tech and the larger business context it operates in. And that is a huge problem, because short-term thinking displaces dreaming, which is required for transformative technologies.

    2. 5

      I’m not familiar with Eve, so maybe this is a dumb question, but what does it mean for a programming language to “wind down”? Active development on the toolset is stopping?

    3. 5

      Seeing a lot of disappointed comments here. However, I can’t say I’m too surprised. Chris Granger previously worked on LightTable, which was supposed to be the next big programming language editor. At some point he stopped working on it and started building Eve. Work started in 2014, and if you look at witheve.com there still isn’t a release that you can access easily from the homepage. It just says that it’s ‘Coming Soon’… after 3 years.

      As an outsider, the lack of any sort of big download button for something that’s at least an alpha version is a fairly large deterrent from taking it seriously. Is it any surprise that the VCs that funded it felt the same way?

    4. 3

      That’s a shame. Eve has some really fascinating ideas going on. If anything it serves as a valuable research product.

    5. 3

      500 upvotes from me to give a little context to that mail <3. I had nearly forgotten how Eve looked like.

      Sad to see it go.

    6. 2

      Ah… man… that’s too bad. Although I haven’t been paying too much attention to Eve, I still thought Chris and company were headed down a really solid track. As others have noted, the amount of research that went into the language—the number of prototypes that the team went through before arriving on the current version—is damn impressive. The whole experiment been super valuable, I think, in discovering how we use computers and reframing how we can making programming better. I guess maybe they were too out of left field. This is the sort of thing that university funding is good for, although academic studies rarely result in things that people can actually use, so it’s incredible that they even made it this far. I hope someone else can pick up the torch :(

    7. 2

      Call me a skeptic, but I expected this when they shut down development on Light Table.

    8. 0

      I hate this project. It’s had big names, big fanfares, big talks, big money grants, they were hiring people.

      But very little was done that mattered in the end. We barely remember this project by now. Nobody even cares about this thing in 15 years. It created absolutely nothing of value and all the ideas presented were already done better in 1980s. It was kind of Bret Victorian in that sense.

      And now it’s going to die. If they had just pushed on something might have come out of this. Now it is guaranteed that everything of this will be forgotten in very short time.

      If you try to shoot at the moon, at least.. Could you try to aim upwards and put enough fuel into the tank?

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