[westoncb]

It's unfortunate the parent is the top comment here. There's a common thing that happens when a new idea shows up that doesn't easily fit into existing categories:(most) people give it a cursory look over, and then decide it's just another instance of boring category X.

This is especially common in discussions about humanizing programming. I think it's partly because people are invested in the current way of doing things, having spent so much time developing their particular skills; and partly because our attempts at serious alternatives have largely been failures, so far. That makes it easy to see any new idea in this space and automatically class it as already understood. But there is room between C++ and toy visual languages, and someone may find something good there yet—and this will illuminate things just that much more if nothing else.

Look into the lineage of ideas the Eve team have moved through to get where they are today, and you've got to admire their search process even if you don't like the results.

In any case, it's patently false that Eve's innovation is analogous to the algebra example given in the parent.

[scottmf]

After spending half an hour reading the article I feared the comments would be like this.

The concepts here are fantastic. Unfortunately, as intelligent as they are, many in this industry seem to have difficulty grasping the benefit of user-focused design, abstraction and simplicity.

UI design by CS engineers has always been terrible; programming languages are no exception to that.

It isn't virtuous to suffer unnecessary complexity. And programming shouldn't be complex just because we can manage it in spite of the complexity.