Chris Granger is the man responsible for Light Table and what you think about his next project is probably conditioned by what you thought about his previous efforts.

Light Table was supposed to revolutionize the way that we program by making it easier to see how your program worked. It shows how data values flow through the program and was inspired by the ideas of Bret Victor. It made it into the top ten Kickstarter projects and used its $316,000 to include Python among the languages it supported.  

Opinion seems to be split on the value of Light Table - some claim that it met its goals, but other point out that its just another IDE and not revolutionary. It is now open source and about to be abandoned by its originator in favour of a new challenge. Overall Chris Granger has some enthusiastic believers and a small, but vocal, band of opponents.

Now we come to the new project. Instead of a Kickstarter, this particular ambition has been funded to the tune of $2.3 million by Andreesen Horowitz. 

The project is called Eve and it claims to be a way to get anyone to program:

"Eve is our way of bringing the power of computation to everyone, not by making everyone a programmer but by finding a better way for us to interact with computers."

OK, but if you have been in programing for even a short time you will have heard this sort of thing before. Everything from program generators to visual coding, but at the end of the day either the system is so restrictive that you end up coding sooner or later, or you just end up coding from the start. 

Not much is known about Eve but what little is on the table isn't promising:

"On the surface, Eve is an environment a little like Excel that allows you to "program" simply by moving columns and rows around in tables."

Excel? OK again, we have some very enthusiastic spreadsheet supporters here at I Programmer. 

"Under the covers it's a powerful database, a temporal logic language, and a flexible IDE that allows you to build anything from a simple website to complex algorithms. Instead of poring over text files full of abstract symbols, you interact with domain editors that are parameterized by grids of data. "

At this point it sounds like hype.  Temporal logic could mean just the way spreadsheet cells are linked together to create data flow driven computation.  

"To build a UI you don’t open a text editor, you just draw it on the screen and drag data to it. It's much closer to the ideal we've always had of just describing what we want and letting the machine do the rest. Eve makes the computer a real tool again - one that doesn't require decades of training to use."

So we have a drag-and-drop editor with some automatic databinding - just like we used to have back in the days of VB6 and Access. 

This is about all we know of Eve and the final statement is:

"While we have a long way to go before Eve is ready for the spotlight, we've shown a few people what we've done so far and their reactions have been exciting."

I guess it all depends on exactly who the people were who were shown it.

The blog entry goes on to say that the company is hiring:

"On the engineering side, we'd especially love to find some folks who have experience working on databases, query optimizers, constraint solvers, systems/ops, and crazy UIs."

And as for Light Table:

"Eve represents the next step for us to take the ideas in Light Table and bring them to far more people. We are stoked for the future that Eve and LT will create together and I hope you'll join us for the ride."

There is always the possibility that a genius will invent something that makes programming so easy programming becomes a non-concept. It is possible, but so far it hasn't happened. We need better tools and if this turns out to be a better tool then perhaps we can forgive the arrogance and presumption. But I think that the $2.3 million would have been better invested in Bret Victor. 

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info