Against the Current: What We Learned from Eve
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I am not making any personal attacks: I am only curious at the way I feel knowing two projects were shuttered before they really had their chance to live.
https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable
It inspired Apple’s Swift Playgrounds. Hopefully, other tools will be inspired by Bret Victor‘s ideas.
By the way, I was an original Kickstarter supporter. I’d back another project like this.
To paraphrase Isaac Newton, we stand on each other’s shoulders. Other people need to stand on their shoulders.
Most of the time developers want tools for free. That makes for slow progress.
Some developers stand in the footprints of giants and complain about the view.
Many developers stand in the footprints of giants, don't realize they're standing in footprints, and will argue very loudly that the particular muddy footprint they're stuck in is amazing, and you're an idiot if you disagree.
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I admire group #1. And I don't blame group #2. You've got to pay the bills somehow, and most people can't afford to join group #1.
As for Eve - the people who invested in it are professionals. They knew going in that programming languages and tools are tough to monetize. I think that the level of commitment shown and the releases of Eve that were delivered are reasonable considering the amount of money that was invested.
Anyway, they inspired so many others who are now working on reactive programming and they showed the market that there is interest in other models of computation, so I see their work as spawning 1000s of others interested in democratising programming.
And yes, I was a professional investor in the past, so we know the risks :)
You might argue that we should have settled on one of our iterations that was close rather than continuing the search for something better. I can't really disagree with that except to say that each of the latest prototypes was such a large improvement over the last that it felt irresponsible to stop short.
Unfortunately, we've had to find work that would keep a roof over our heads, but that doesn't mean we've buried the work we've done. We've open sourced Light Table and every iteration of Eve that was remotely useful, and we've worked hard to share the most important things we learned on the journey with those who might continue it through essays, speaking, and thorough commenting in the most interesting sections of our code. Nothing would make me happier than having someone take inspiration from our attempt and build the future of programming before I have the financial freedom to return to working on it.
Like everyone at Kodowa, I just want to live in the world where those tools exist. I am sad that we weren't able to complete them in the short time that we had, but I am not sad that we tried.
I'm also on the dream of build a relational lang (http://tablam.org) but tied to a more practical concern: How move all my data/processing logic that I have around dozen languages and frameworks so i can do a medium size ERP. In fact, I do "erp-like" modules all my life and it getting harder and costlier with the explosion on targets and needs.
I think you must have focused in a "sqlite-like" version that can be integrated inside any project. (this, btw, is my goal). Also, this kind of project was made for the traditional enterprise/financial customer. You could have some chance there, IMHO.
I read a little of the big post, I see that you get scared when Apple and others start using the ideas of yours seriously. I commit the same mistake years ago. Is true that have a big gorilla in your same space means it will eat a big pie of the market fast, but not matter what, the gorilla is never as good as the one with a more clear idea. And you can take a part of the slice just for be the ones to fall back when the gorilla-solution blow in the customers faces.
Part of my life is take over after a "big-project" and do something for real.
For all the effort invested to not be in vain, it is important for the community to be able to learn (generalizable) lessons from these failures. Hence the typical focus on putting out a product, even if not complete, and publishing a paper, to close out a line of research.
When I try to look for an understandable summary of lessons learned from LT/Eve, I get the feeling that the tidbits are a little scattered, and not quite in a form manifestly usable by the community. Have you solicited suggestions about how this could be improved? For starters, it would be great if there could be a centralized repository listing all the various blog posts, talks, etc during the evolution of LT/Eve and the retrospectives. If that already exists, it would be great to publicize it more, and the community could organize around that and discuss how to take it further. There's a lot of excitement about the direction LT/Eve pioneered and it would be good to harness it for the next round of attempts :-)
Also, I don't mean to imply that the LT/Eve team has not done that -- eg: thanks for open sourcing LT! I'm just thinking out loud about how to better pass on the less tangible learnings.
Blog posts are mostly here: http://incidentalcomplexity.com and a couple here: http://www.chris-granger.com
Talks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_4ecWDohnk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V1ynVyud4M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DShccXxyiAY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZQoAKJPbh8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_o-ZzgpiK8
Prototypes are collected here:
https://github.com/witheve/eve-experiments
I'll try to make this nicer and put it on our homepage.
The folks behind LightTable/Eve have a commitment to living their life as they see fit. That's it. They had some ideas they wanted to work on. If you want to support creative people doing creative things, you give them money.
That's it. If you want creativity, you have to give and not expect anything in return and when it works out, that's great!
You may be confused by established companies that were once creative, now doing incremental improvements every year, selling it as creative work. It creates an unrealistic expectation of what the creative process is actually like - full of things that didn't work.
Fortunately, in this case, the page is being generated by a simple function that reads the YouTube format — so you can paste in the text, and create (and quickly publish) a transcript for any YouTube video you please:
https://beta.observablehq.com/@jashkenas/youtube-transcriber
In my opinion, the best bits were those which focused on the learnings and lessons of the experience. While the startup narrative was interesting, I would have loved to have gone deeper into the conclusions of Chris and the rest in retrospect.