Comment by rafaelferreira | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rafaelferreira | Hacker News Reader

Seeing Eve's development out in the open is inspiring. Many of the commenters are coming from positions of extreme skepticism towards new approaches to programming, probably justified by the history of the field, but I'd recommend to spend some more time looking into the research idbknox and his team have been conducting (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8, for instance) and how much they have iterated based on user experimentation.

A few questions come to mind now: 1 - This new demo, with the messaging app sample, and references to "my pm wants this or that" seems to point a change in positioning, from targeting non-programmers to professional programmers. Is this accurate?

2 - Is there a plan to integrate the grid-style or the adlibs style UI into this new iteration?

3 - If non-programmers are still a target, it seems to me that the ease of importing data from external sources would important to reach broad usage. Any research here?

4 - Html and css might be a hurdles for new users, any way Eve will help on this front?

(edited for formatting)

Solid questions!

1. We could be more clear about this, but expanding to suit the needs of non-programmers is still very much in the cards. It falls under the umbrella of milestone 3 [1].

2. We're very interested in improving the process of generating UI. To start with, that will mean expanding our library of views (essentially Eve's version of web components) to cover a wider range of common use cases. Beyond that though, HTML is pretty crufty with layers upon layers of of additions and legacy support, it would be very interesting to explore alternative markup models.

3. It certainly is very important. Our model for interacting with the external world is pretty simple. For the most part You can use our first party modules (like `@http` for web requests) to pull the requisite data into Eve where you can transform it into whatever shape is appropriate. For cases where you need entirely new transport systems (like connecting Eve to USB devices), you can create a new module just like the first party ones and side load it in. Since the runtime is currently written in Typescript, that's the language of choice for these extensions. We may support others in the future.

4. For users unfamiliar with HTML and CSS, the best we can do is insulate them from it, as in #2. If it's a subject that personally interests you, I'd love to strike up a conversation on the mailing list about how we can improve the markup process [2].

[1] http://programming.witheve.com/#justataste [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/eve-talk

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