Comment by grzm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grzm | Hacker News Reader

I think there's potentially a lot of ways we can improve our programming environments. I like moon shots, people willing to explore new ways that are unconventional, approaching problems in different ways. I've followed Light Table and have been looking forward to seeing what Chris and friends come up with for Eve.

That said, this is feeling very grandiose. I'd like to understand more clearly where they see Eve being useful — and where Eve would not be useful. For example:

- how does one implement new algorithms? A simple example, how do I write Quicksort?

- can Eve be written in Eve?

Admittedly, I haven't thought about this nearly as much as the Eve team has. And perhaps I'm just lacking the required imagination at this point. That said, I'd like to see these types of questions addressed. There's nothing wrong with a tool that's useful in a particular set of circumstances. I'd like to know what the Eve team thinks those circumstances are.

Check out our followup on that : http://programming.witheve.com/deepdives/whateveis.html

1) Eve is amazing at graph algorithms, not so much at writing quicksort. At the same time, you don't need to write quicksort in Eve - it has all of the things you'd get from something like a SQL database. In general, anything requiring strict sequential order will be just ok right now, but it turns out actually very few things do.

2) sure and we have written some of it in Eve, check some of my other comments for links :)

Thanks for the follow-up. Indeed, the link you provided is exactly what I was asking for. (And I see that it's there in your initial post as well.) Cheers!

Is there a more precise description of the runtime semantics anywhere? “A variant of Datalog” is helpful but doesn’t say much.

For instance, it looks like every “commit” is essentially a sequence point that produces a step in the “fixpointer”—and from that terminology I guess Eve is Turing-complete, unlike Datalog? Do you test all patterns at every commit, or only those whose dependencies have changed? And if the latter, then how do you track such dependencies? Are they fully specified declaratively by queries? And what is the granularity—per term, per database?

The semantics are similar to Dedalus, which is compared to Datalog here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Aa4PivG0g

That was an excellent talk, thanks. It cleared up a lot of details about the paradigm for me. That said, now I’m more interested in Dedalus/bloom than Eve. :P

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