[ibdknox]

Eve[1] is in the process of becoming a lot more real than it has been up to this point. We've found a great model and discovered a way to build a high performance implementation of it, which means much of the foundational research is finally in place. Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be revamping our website, docs, etc to help people get started building real things with it. :)

There's going to be a lot of really exciting stuff coming over the next few months. We've gathered a set of ideas, evidence, and implementations that have certainly blown us away - we hope others will find it valuable too.

EDIT: I realized I didn't address your initial question. Fwiw, we just recently crossed a really big milestone in terms of usage - more than 40,000 people have now played around with Eve on http://play.witheve.com and we've learned a ton from that experience. Part of the website revamp will be making that workflow simpler and nicer. We have a surprisingly high conversion rate (> 30%), so hopefully we can help smooth out that experience and begin to grow the community more and more.

[1]: http://witheve.com

[throwaway7645]

I can't load the site on my phone. Mind pointing out what makes Eve so special? I'm suspicious of us figuring out anything mind boggling new at this point and assumed Eve was all a gimmick (I hope to be proved wrong :)). Something like Red makes a lot of sense to me as that ahhh language as it is tiny with no install, can be used for high/low level coding, has excellent DSLs such as GUI builders, and can compile to a native binary to name a few things that kind of shocked me. Eve seems to be more like an online Smalltalk? It's always fascinating to hear new ideas and I wish the best for your project!

[cmontella]

We've certainly taken a lot of inspiration from Smalltalk, but I think the semantics we've arrived at make a really nice programming environment, with some surprising properties you may not think are possible.

Eve has a similar philosophy to Red/Rebol - that programming is needlessly complex, and by fixing the model we can make the whole ordeal a lot nicer. We start with a uniform data model - everything in Eve is represented by records (key value pairs attached to a unique ID). This keeps the language small, both implementation-wise and in terms of the number of operators you need to learn.

Programs in Eve are made up of small blocks of code that compose automatically. In each block you query records and then specify transforms on those records. Blocks are short and declarative, and are reactive to changes in data so you don't worry about callbacks, caching, routing, etc.

Due to this design, we've reduced the error footprint of the language -- there are really only 3 kinds of errors you'll ever encounter, and those mostly relate to data missing or being in the wrong shape that you expect. What's more, we'll actually be able to catch most errors with the right tooling. You'll never experience your app crashing or errors related to undefined/nil values.

We've made sure your program is transparent and inspectable. If you want to monitor a value in the system, you can just write a query that displays it, as the program is running. I like to think of this as a "multimeter for code". You can do this for variables, memory, HTTP requests, the code itself ... since everything is represented as records, everything is inspectable.

Because at its core Eve is a database, we also store all the information necessary to track the provenance of values. This is something most languages can't do, because the information just isn't there. So for instance if a value is wrong, you can find out exactly how it was generated.

There's a lot more work to do, but we have big plans going forward. We plan to make the runtime distributed and topology agnostic, so you can potentially write a program that scales to millions of users without having to worry about provisioning servers or worrying about how your code scales.

We're also planning on multiple interfaces to the runtime. Right now we have a text syntax, but there's no reason we couldn't plug in a UI specific editor that integrates with text code. We've explored something like this already.

Anyway, those are future directions, but what we have right now is a set of semantics that allow for the expression of programs without a lot of the boilerplate and hassle you have to go through in traditional languages, and which provide some unique properties you won't find in any other language (at least none that I've used).

[lioeters]

Thank you for these intriguing thoughts behind the development of Eve. This project was for me the most valuable find in this whole discussion. There are a number of fundamental design decisions in Eve that opened my eyes to a fresh rethinking of the underlying assumptions in existing languages.

The code examples demonstrate surprising simplicity in achieving features that would be complicated to implement in other languages. I'm convinced that Eve will influence how programmers think (at least it did for me) and promote development of languages/frameworks/libraries that adopt some of these ideas. Great work, will be following with interest.

[throwaway7645]

Thanks for the long description! It is most appropriated and helped me get a feel. I agree wholeheartedly that programming needs to change. Best of luck! I'll be keeping an eye out on Eve.

Quick question: Will it always be online only?