Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cmontella 3491 days ago
> 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.