| I just wanted to respond to your comment, even though I see you posted later in this thread that you re-read Chris' post in a different light. In developing Eve, we faced a problem of getting involved in too many research projects. How do you make a new language and a new interface to that language at the same time? It was very hard, and in the end we realized it was a mistake to take this route. For instance, how do you version control and make unit tests for a card wiki UI? Instead, we are developing the language first, getting that to a point where it's stable, well defined, and actually used by people. In order to do this, we needed an interface that was also well understood and defined, and the only choice there really is a textual syntax. This has several benefits: 1: we know how to make a textual interface. We've made many, and there really aren't too many questions there. 2: people know how to use textual interfaces and there are tons of tools out there to work with them 3: developers in particular, the people who will be using our language first, are comfortable with textual interfaces 4: we can still provide some innovation here, and make Eve exciting to work with for the people who want to use it this way. The obvious drawback is that we're not making a huge leap in programming interfaces this way. But that's okay, since we're making progress in another direction that really is a prerequisite to bringing computation to everyone. When Eve the platform is better understood, we'll tackle the even bigger hurdle of an interface that appeals to more than just developers. |