[ilostmykeys]

Why don't you just make that app for iOS/Android and let food truck owners download it? I know that is a useless thing to suggest given your intent but I think it's equally useless for food truck owners to want to build their own app. There must be a better range of use cases.

[erikpukinskis]

You were flagged but this is a great question.

I think the more useful ability for the food truck operator is the ability to modify the software their business runs on, not the ability to build it from scratch.

Imagine everything on everyone's desk was bolted to it, and you could only choose between a few desk packages. Someone comes along and says "people should be able to put together their own desk packages!" But everyone wonders: "huh? I'm not a furniture engineer. What would I do with a custom desk that I can't do with an off-the-shelf one?"

But as we know people come up with all kinds of uses for desks when they are allowed to reconfigure them freely.

That's what we're losing out on by not making software reconfigurable, at least a little bit at the top layer.

What we have right now is a series of buttons that add or remove bolted down components from your desk. Eve is trying to imagine what it might look like to actually be able to move things around freely, add duct tape etc.

I know it's a weak argument, because no one really knows what people would exactly do with the ability to modify their software. It just seems to me like the kind of thing that would pay off.

[fsloth]

"no one really knows what people would exactly do with the ability to modify their software."

I think we do. Excel, and the various systems implemented on top of it. To my understanding systems built on top of Excel are used to run all sorts of things, even live hardware, because it's so approachable and easy to modify.

Perhaps Eve can be 'sold' to the industries that rely on Excel. First the project can just add @excel database....

[cmontella]

> I think the more useful ability for the food truck operator is the ability to modify the software their business runs on, not the ability to build it from scratch.

Yes, I agree with this 100%, and this is one of the main goals for Eve, much further down the line (see some of our experiments with graphical interfaces to Eve: https://github.com/witheve/eve-experiments)

But even today we're focused on making programs easier to read and modify. Let's say a food truck owner (with a little technical experience) does download our app written in Eve, and wants to modify a button.

When he opens the program, he can see a table of contents, and code written in a literate programming style. So immediately there's a place to start.

The user could read through the document and try to find the place where the button is drawn, but the program is running right there. The user can inspect the button in question, and the editor will point right to the code that draws it.

The user can modify the code right there, and see changes to the app immediately. This workflow is similar to what we demoed in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWAMr72VaaU

Obviously given the current form of Eve, this scenario requires a food truck owner who is also a developer. But supporting simple workflows that make using a computer easier is central to what we're trying to do with this language.

[ilostmykeys]

Not sure why I was flagged. Any ideas? Seems excessively narrow minded on the part of those who did the flagging.

Anyways... I see there is a tier missing between the consumer of such model and Eve. That tier is of the Assemblers (a light version of the traditional "Developer") who will take requirements to modify an Eve app to the liking of the given consumer. They (the Assembler)( could also put out different versions of the app that fit the most requested use cases.

I think the thing that the Eve developers are missing (from their mental model) is that the "essential complexity" of a given task is irreducible and is often more than someone who is not an algorithmic thinker can handle. This is different than the "incidental complexity" which Eve might reduce greatly.

[tonyg]

Do you think that, generally, if someone needs an app to do something they've just thought of, that there should exist some way for them to build it themselves? If not, why not?

We will know the age of "personal computing" has truly arrived when such things are possible. At the moment, our hypothetical food truck owner (and many, many more people I know personally) are at the mercy of others, frustrated and unable to achieve their computing goals unaided.

[fsloth]

Less complex programming systems have existed for decades for PC. Excel, Matlab, Mathematica and so on.

I don't think anyone denies they've brought tremendous value to professionals in need of some ad hoc programs.

[ibdknox]

I probably did a poor job explaining, but that's what the example is: an app that a food truck owner could use to run their food truck. :)

> There must be a better range of use cases.

There are lots of businesses I'm sure we could build, but that's not really our goal. This one happens to be straightforward and real, so it seemed decent. Do you have any suggestions that you think would make for a better demonstration?

[dman]

Analyzing logs seems like a great demo, since the app largely needs to give people the ability to work with data - so the data oriented parts of Eve should have an excellent opportunity to stand out.