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Comment by robertkrahn01 | Hacker News Reader

I'm very sorry to see this. We need investment in programming language and environments – and right now there is pretty much zero of it. No, new programming concepts and tools will not pay of immediately but in the long term they can be incredible efficiency multipliers, empowering pros to do more work in less time and non-pros to be programming in the first place. As long as no one is interested in funding this kind of research & development we stay where we are today.

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> and right now there is pretty much zero of it

There's huge investment in programming languages and environments. It wouldn't surprise me if there's more than there has ever been at any one time.

And it's entirely healthy that some fail. That's a primary means of learning. I would anticipate that some of the ideas from Eve will find their way into other environments, as did ideas from LightTable before it.

Where? The state of the art today of

- debugging

- code browsing, system exploration

- customizable, modular, non-textual user interfaces*

- immediate feedback after code changes

- non-textual programming

is < what Lisp and Smalltalk environments provided more than thirty years ago.

* not necessarily visual programming. Look at the Genera Lisp OS or Plan 9 for example.

Languages: Swift, Go, Rust, Julia, Haskell, JS, C++ etc etc

Dev envs: VSCode, Electron, more build systems than you can shake a stick at, VMs, containers, playgrounds etc

Non-textual programming. For general purpose programming, I can't think of any. There are some dead ends that will probably remain so. For niche programming, there are loads.

And to my point, Lisp, Smalltalk and Plan 9 are all good examples of failed experiments that folk took ideas from and used in subsequent projects.

Now, you may not like the investment and innovation. It may not be what you had in mind. Each to their own. But there's plenty of investment and no small amount of innovation.

labview is a general purpose visual programming language. it's as general purpose as, say, python. it's just different and proprietary.

That's fair. Same can be said for some of the educational tools too.

More of a cul de sac than a dead end.

No, it's not about personal preference. It is about what is (im)possible when the only context to be considered is the status quo. The technologies you list are innovative but in the end just iterations of inventions of the 1970s. The 70s were so special because stuff happened there was the result of increased spending into science and research of the 60s after the Sputnik crisis [1]. Today's R&D is not focused on what could be possible in 10, 20, or 30 years but in 1, 2, or 3 quarters since companies funding the research need to be focused on their bottom line. The Eve project was special insofar in that it received funding not tied to short-term goals – but only to an amount that in the end wasn't enough. Similar things happened elsewhere and this bars the way to more meaningful inventions [2].

[1] The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. Mitchell Waldrop.

[2] Founder School Session: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o

This. There is little funding for the kind of research that will lead us out of the tarpit (and less with the demise of HARC). My hat is off to Eve's investors for being unusually far-thinking for SV. But ultimately this is the responsibility of our research institutions, which unfortunately have other priorities.

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