Vision Question

[Dave Morehouse]

While one would think the Eve current vision is audacious enough (programming for all, world distributed computation, etc...)  I'm curious if the team has talked about building an OS where everything is implemented in Eve.  While distributed/networked Eve is a HUGE gain, Eve is still confined to an application.  I want the equivalent of the Eve inspector tool but at the OS level so I can write small Eve blocks to cause unrelated apps to work together.  For example, when publishing my latest blog post, an Eve block to post to my social media accounts.  When an email is received from an "important" person, an Eve block to text me.  Certainly you need to solve for Eve in a single app first, I was just curious if you've thought about turning Eve into a modern day SmallTalk environment.   Eve's simple model seems so promising, I don't want any boundaries on where I can use it.  More than anything else that I've seen lately, I think that would turn a computer into a tool instead of a collection of unrelated, single purpose, non-interoperable apps.

[Josh Cole]

I think that would turn a computer into a tool...

Absolutely. This has been on our minds since Eve's conception, and both SmallTalk and HyperCard have been inspirations. To make this happen, you need to do two things: 1) give people a pool of data that is personally relevant, and 2) an intuitive way to query and manipulate it. Unix was one of the first great breakthroughs here. Piping and the shell allow users to compose small programs for complex purposes. 1) You can consume data from files and other programs, and 2) build a pipeline to work with it. Unix's real flaw was the data model. Since everything is reduced to strings, data is inherently unstructured, and handling complicated data is finicky and error prone. Bash scripts have earned some notoriety due to this -- most of those problems stem from the medium rather than the implementation. Microsoft saw this and tried to remedy it with PowerShell. Instead of strings, the interop is .NET objects, so everything is reasonably structured. What they've done is pretty impressive, but it hasn't seen wild adoption because it's clunky to use. To gain any benefit, schemas must be agreed upon in advance or verbosely specified by the user. In a sense, Eve is the logical conclusion of the unix paradigm. Small blocks do small tasks, and as a bonus the plumbing is handled for you. Rather than unstructured text or a variety of different data types, everything in between reduces down to human- and machine-readable records.

In terms of actually running at the OS level, I'd like to see that someday. As it is, the host OS is only really providing us with platform-specific IO and hardware drivers. We don't multithread yet, but we do have all the information required to intelligently schedule work, and our synchronous programming model insulates the user from many of concurrency's complexities. Unless there was some "Eve OS" specific feature your application wanted to take advantage of, there's no changes you should need to make for the compiler to build it to run on bare metal.

In the meantime, I think it'd be a lot of fun just to run Eve on an Arduino. It's a lot closer to the hardware there than on PC, and Eve loves data, so IoT hobby projects should be a great fit.