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by ibdknox 3005 days ago
I completely agree that the semantics are probably the most overall useful thing we presented in this version of Eve. Having the world just be views over a datastore that you don't have to manage in any meaningful way is hugely liberating coming from the way we program now. You don't have to worry so much about how things are "placed" - you can always access them wherever and however you want. Bloom gave us a nice way of thinking about how to deal with change in that context so that it's not just some giant pile of scary mutable state.

Removing the fetching and placing of data is probably the biggest source of Eve's efficiency too. It turns out a lot of the code we write is nothing more than plumbing things into the correct location.
1 comments
iamwil 3005 days ago
> I completely agree that the semantics [of views over a datastore] are probably the most overall useful thing presented in this version of Eve.

Were you guys planning a next version of Eve with a different useful semantic? Or was this idea of having the world as views over a datastore the last overall useful idea that you guys ended up with?

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ibdknox 3005 days ago
There were a few directions we went hereafter. One was thinking of the world in terms of simulations, another was statemachine oriented. There are a few things that were never quite right with the set of semantics here: things that really were an ordered set of steps (far fewer things than you think, but still some) were pretty hard to express and the distinction between commit and bind caused some weird things to happen at the edges. The former could be fixed by directly integrating statemachines into the language. The latter remains a bit of an open problem. Some things you want to manually manage the lifetime of, others you want to be tied to their supports. The problem is that you often want to mix and match those freely, which is just a tough thing to reason about.

Taking a stronger stance that Eve was still a bit too much like programming, and not as directly modeling as we meant for it to be, can take you to some interesting places too.

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hammerandtongs 3005 days ago
I'm sorry you didn't move forward with the state machine integrations.

I think some core primitives and conventions exposed at the language level would have developed it into a uniquely useful language environment.

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