Comment by BoiledCabbage
3 months ago
I remember both LightTable and Eve. At the time I thought they were both really interesting ideas but wasn't sure where they were going.
Re-reading the eve website now, with 10+ years more experience and understanding of languages I'm really astounded at how brilliant Eve was, and how far ahead of it's time it was (and still is). Also at how rare it is to have any revolutionary ideas in modern programming language design make it out of theory in contemporary times. There were many radical ideas in the 60 and 70s, but so much now is incremental.
It's a shame Eve couldn't continue, just to see what it would've become and the influence it would have had on language expectations. Really cool stuff in there. While not likely, I hope someone picks up those ideas and continues them.
Did the effort just run out of funding? Or did it hit a stumbling block?
Thanks for the kind words, and I agree it is a shame, but we a ran out of money! Chris raised $2m from investors, and we spent that over 3 years with a pretty minimal burn rate as far as SF startups go. We couldn't really show a path to making money at that time (although I still think we were on to some things), so we couldn't raise anymore. We tried for an acquihire but nah.
As for continuing the ideas, I'm putting a lot of what we learned into Mech. I know that Chris and Josh went to work at Relational AI, but I'm not sure exactly what work they got up to there. But Chris recently posted about generative AI and how it goes back to things we were thinking about in 2015 with respect to Eve: https://x.com/ibdknox/status/1630548754238435330
So in that sense generative AI can be a vector for some of the ideas in Eve coming to the mainstream.