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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> No one is talking about making normal people into professional programmers.

Right, he's talking about replacing the need for professional programmers. And, in doing so, he focuses on not needing the guy that knows a particular language, rather than not needing the guy that can think through a structure a logical approach to solving the problem.

Its all pretty vague, anyway, and the further clarification on the thread sounds like the goal is the yet another app builder (the supposed gap left by VB6 is specifically cited as the motivation) for the web, of which there are many existing now, all with similar pitches about letting "normal people" (or business experts) build line-of-business apps without hiring a professional programmer.

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> And, in doing so, he focuses on not needing the guy that knows a particular language

That's a pretty narrow way of reading what I was saying. What I meant is the one guy who knows how to program and I just happened to pick Python because that's the common case in science. Do you really think a mathematician, biologist, or chemist can't think through a logical approach to solving a problem? I certainly believe they can, the problem is then in translating that to the computer. Right now, that would mean knowing (pick your programming language) and translating that logical solution. We want to make that way, way easier, to the point where it's like using the tools you already do to do this stuff (Excel).

> Its all pretty vaguem, anyway, and the further clarification on the thread sounds like the goal is the yet another app builder

We've bootstrapped the editor, parts of the incremental compiler, parts of the platform, the domain editors, etc. If you can do that in an "yet another app builder", I'd definitely love to see it. We're picking one domain to focus on because that's how you grow a product, but at the end of the day, if it doesn't suit my needs as well, I certainly can't call it a "better programming" in general.

> Do you really think a mathematician, biologist, or chemist can't think through a logical approach to solving a problem?

No, then again, I think that mathemeticians, biologists, and chemists now, with existing tools, often program computers to solve problems without being "professional programmers". (And not just with Excel and similar tools.)

> We've bootstrapped the editor, parts of the incremental compiler, parts of the platform, the domain editors, etc. If you can do that in an "yet another app builder", I'd definitely love to see it.

I think all of that is significant, and I didn't intend to minimize that.

> We're picking one domain to focus on because that's how you grow a product

Insofar as I have concerns with the way the short-term focus is described, its that:

1) There isn't a clear description of what unique thing Eve intends to the table in that initial focal market, and

2) The initial focal market, as it has been described, seems quite crowded, rather than a gap that needs filled.

Perhaps an even more accurate approximation is "replacing the need for professional programmers for problems that shouldn't require professional programming"

A simple example of this is SQL. You shouldn't need to be a pro engineer to run some simple queries.

Another example is Mathematica. Scientists and engineers want to solve their domain problems, can learn a little bit of stuff, but shouldn't have to learn about build tools or d3 just to plot some data and solve some equations.

Whether Eve gets the balance right and is useful remains to be seen, but there is plenty of room at the bottom for empowering non-engineers.

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