[ZenoArrow]

What's interesting to me is that the more Eve develops the more it seems to be returning to its LightTable roots. This isn't a bad thing, there's still plenty of life in the LightTable approach, but my impression of Eve before was that it was designed to be a tool that non-programmers would use. Based on this latest blog post, it appears that may be of less importance. I still hope Eve continues to develop in its current direction, I'd like to see how the immediate feedback and flexibility of Eve can continue to be refined.

[logicallee]

A programming language that non-programmers can use is like a written language that illiterate people can read: it's an oxymoron. (The minute you can use it, you're a "programmer"; the minute you can read, you're "literate")

[ModernMech]

Not everyone who writes is necessarily a writer. In the same vein, not everyone who wants to tell a computer what to do wants to be a programmer.

[logicallee]

but when people say "that non-programmers can use" they don't mean "that people whose job title isn't 'programmer' can use." They mean "that people who can't program can use." it's a bit confusing and I suppose I could be wrong. (They could mean "people whose job title isn't 'programmer.'")

[MichaelBurge]

Somebody who makes a spreadsheet is telling a computer what to do. Are advanced users of Excel programmers?

Businesses occasionally express the business rules in the form of spreadsheets to be directly implemented into code.

Spreadsheets even double as unit tests.

[falcor84]

> Are advanced users of Excel programmers? Yes.

Edit: here's a previous discussion about a Turing Machine in excel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6416631

[bthallplz]

The previous form of Eve wasn't quite a programming language at all. It was akin to databases in Excel.

[skybrian]

I think they explained in a previous blog post that they wanted a programmer-friendly format to exist, but this is a side feature.

Still, I'm skeptical. It seems rather unlikely that implicitly taking a cartesian product of two lists of query results is beginner-friendly.