Comment by dunham

2 days ago

The "Eve" programming language / IDE - https://witheve.com

It was a series of experiments with new approaches to programming. Kind of reminded me of the research that gave us Smalltalk. It would have been interesting to see where they went with it, but they wound down the project.

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dunham

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cobertos  2 days ago

Why did they not pursue this? Were there any applications using this in the wild? It was not immediately obvious from their github repository.

  • cmontella  1 day ago

    I worked on this project so I can give some insight. The main reason we didn't keep working on it was it was VC funded and we didn't have a model for making money in the short term. At the end we were pursuing research related to natural language programming and reinforcement learning in that area (I recently blogged about it here: https://mech-lang.org/post/2025-01-09-programming-chatgpt), and were considering folding our small team into OpenAI or Microsoft or something. But we wanted to work as a team and no one wanted to take us as a team, so we called it.

    It didn't get far enough to be "used" in a production sense. There was enough interest and people were playing around with it, but no real traction to speak of. Frankly, language projects are difficult because these days they have to be bootstrapped to a certain size before there's any appreciable use, and VCs are not patient enough for that kind of timetable.

    Here's a postmortem Chris gave about all that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT2CMS0MxJ0 / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThjFFDwOXok

  • KingMob  1 day ago

    I don't personally know, but I used to use the creator (Granger)'s previous work, the Clojure live-running editor LightTable.

    LT was cool, but they abandoned it with insufficient hand-off when it was 80-90% done to work on Eve.

    I know a bunch of people were unhappy that LightTable wasn't finished, especially because they raised money via Kickstarter for it.

    Maybe Eve was too ambitious. Maybe funding never materialized. Maybe they just got bored and couldn't finish. Maybe they pissed off their audience.

veqq  1 day ago

https://eyg.run/ is heavily inspired by eve!