> 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.
> 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.
I'm fairly certainly that he has in mind the vision put forward in Prof. David Harel's late-career manifesto Can Programming be Liberated, Period? (2008)[1]
Five years earlier, Prof. Harel wrote a book, Come, Let's Play[2], in which he explored the role that temporal logic[3] could have in the building of reactive software systems (e.g. desktop GUI applications, among many others). If you visit Harel's full list of publications[4] and do an in-page search for the terms "LSC", "behavioral" and "scenario", you can follow the links to a number of papers published since the early 2000s, related to the application of temporal logic in the process of software design.
It's possible that my connection of Granger's "eve" to Harel's work is completely mistaken; and if so, I apologize for jumping the gun.
We did read the manifesto and I'm fairly convinced that Harel's vision of interactive specification and refinement is the the long-term future of software. I'm not sure how to get there though, short of general AI. Eve aims to reduce the amount of specification required and can make sensible guesses about implementation, but it is not able to 'fill in the blanks' for partial specifications and we won't be focusing on that any time soon.
Thinking of programming as a dialogue with the computer is a really strong metaphor that I gladly recognize as something that inspired you [1][2].
Short: You provide the goals and the constraints, then through a back and forth dialogue with the computer you describe and clarify the problem (and also your understanding). You keep on negotiating and providing more constraints until it simply finds a possible solution (the problem domain is now computable) or the best fitting solution now satisfies your needs (in time).
The hardest parts are probably:
1. Collecting, developing the constraint solvers. Should we imagine that collection more as platform of user contributed (programmed/trained) packages?
2. Developing the dialouge that is not just textual but visual (in both ways) (notepad vs IDE vs Theater(?!) don't forget macros/acting out!)). Showing is always faster then writing and gives one better cues on the closures/framework of the actual discussion.
I'm not sure if it's an inspiration for Chris but it's definitely related since a key focus for Chris seems to be on building it on immutable data structures (and hence essentially temporal.)
