Eve is winding down

[Chris Granger]

Hi everyone,

Despite some promising leads and lots of meetings over the past several months, we weren't able to find a good home for Eve. Unfortunately that means we have to start the process of winding the company down and looking for other opportunities for ourselves.

I want to thank all of you for your support over the years. Through your feedback and championing we accomplished more than we could have ever imagined. Thank you for following along and believing in the vision we set out - it means a lot.

I think Josh and Corey are going to follow up with more of their thoughts, so I don't want to steal their thunder, but this has been an amazing experience and we covered so much of the space that it's hard to even begin to summarize what we've learned. Once things settle down a bit more, I hope to write out more of our thoughts and show some things we hadn't shown publicly yet. We also open sourced the 0.4 Rust runtime today, so that's there to play with if you want (though there are definitely still some bugs in it). It's been a long 6 years between Light Table and Eve and, at least for the immediate future, I'll be taking a much needed break - though I'm sure I won't stay away from the problem for too long :)

I wish you all the best of luck - so long, and thanks for all the fish.

Cheers,

Chris.

[and...@sig.ma]

Thanks for dreaming big dreams, Chris, and looking forward to seeing what you throw yourself at next!

[William Taysom]

 Thanks for all the fish.

[jwy...@gmail.com]

Just combine Eve with a promising crypto project like Tezos and you won't need a home for Eve.. you'll have a world :)

[ruben.n...@gmail.com]

Thank you for your work Chris,

Enjoy your much-needed break.

Even the short amount of time I wrote Eve taught me that programming doesn't need to be so complex.

If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have believed you could program without loops.

If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have thought twice about why all of the different layers of the stack communicated and passed data around in different ways.

If Eve didn't come along I wouldn't have believed you could just programming the happy case, because the runtime would run only the blocks of code that work with your state.

Rest assured that rethinking and reimagining programming has a bigger movement now than when you started and you helped drive it.

Ruben

On Wednesday, January 24, 2018 at 3:12:30 PM UTC-5, Chris Granger wrote:

[Nick Smith]

Thanks for all your work Chris. It's been inspiring to hear your vision and see Eve develop.

It sounds like one of your biggest technical achievements was the constraint-based interpreter/optimiser for Eve programs. I'd really be interested in a thorough technical blog post discussing this system. It would be a shame for the knowledge you've gained there to be lost to history.

[10ze...@gmail.com]

Hi Chris,

Outstanding work on Eve and Light Table. 

It is really unfortunate that Eve didn't work out. I applaud your efforts to move the state of the art further along.

Enjoy the rest. I can't wait to see what you re-imagine next. 

Regards,

d.

On Thursday, 25 January 2018 07:12:30 UTC+11, Chris Granger wrote:

[Gregg Williams]

I'm sad not to see the next iteration of Eve. The only thing that stopped you was external forces, not any limitation on your own ability.

You attempted to crack the toughest nut there is: turning software creation into something everybody could do. Even if you can't follow them up, someone out there will.

They will stand on your shoulders. Thanks!

[st...@steveklabnik.com]

I'm sorry to hear this. Eve was, and is, wonderful.

Good luck to the team in everything they do in the future.

[msg...@gmail.com]

I've followed your talks and projects religiously, Chris. Your dedication and voice in the language space has been thoroughly inspiring for me to reconsider everything I know about programming. Your influence is next to the likes of Rich Hickey and Bret Victor.
As a passerby, thank you for everything you've done so far. I cannot wait to see where how your ideas and contributions will grow.

[Pascal Bergmann]

Thanks a lot for your effort, Chris & team. Eve has been the most inspiring coding stuff in years. I'm still convinced Eve generally sits on the right track. The concept is brilliant. But it's not yet accessible enough to people. "Modern Excel" concepts like Coda are (see: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16497444/coda-spreadsheet-krypton-shishir-mehrotra). Eve is much more than that. Isn't there a way to create a fork of Eve that focusses on a specific business problem to capture some value back?

And then there's the "world computer" story that somehow sounds blockchainy. No chance to map a way out there?

[riley...@gmail.com]

This was such a great project, and I hope to see more from you in the future. I wish you luck in all your endeavors.

On Wednesday, January 24, 2018 at 3:12:30 PM UTC-5, Chris Granger wrote:

[marcin...@gmail.com]

Wow, I only found out about Eve from this announcement, and it looks amazing. I hope you open source this, at least if you can't find a buyer for the assets. 

Similarly, I hope there's enough of a user community to step up to developing this. 

And if I may echo the puckish suggestion of another on this thread: jam some blockchain functionality onto Eve and promote it for that use ;)

On Wednesday, January 24, 2018 at 3:12:30 PM UTC-5, Chris Granger wrote:

[Steve Phillips]

> It sounds like one of your biggest technical achievements was the constraint-based interpreter/optimiser for Eve programs. I'd really be interested in a thorough technical blog post discussing this system. It would be a shame for the knowledge you've gained there to be lost to history.

My thoughts exactly; please blog about this!

[quantu...@gmail.com]

Hi. Doing the Eve tutorial was inspiring. Thank you for your effort in changing and improving how we think.

On Wednesday, January 24, 2018 at 3:12:30 PM UTC-5, Chris Granger wrote:

[magicmo...@gmail.com]

I am sorry to hear of the cessation of the Eve project. It was an inspiration to my own modest efforts in the contest for the next generation main computer language. I think most thinking programmers know that Java and JavaScript will be in the dustbin of history, it just a question of when, not if, and i can't think of a more important, but rather risky project. I say risky because only one language can be the primary language for general purpose programming, and none of the current languages fix the vexing problems that have beleaguered programmers since day 1. 

a friendly rivalry stimulates all the contestants. There are some remaining contestants; I see that Red (a Rebol derivative) is chasing an initial coin offering, the latest way to get rich quick, and there is the Luna team cranking away in Poland. 

[ahmed....@gmail.com]

Agree with both

[michael.t...@gmail.com]

The research and findings Eve produced are timeless, and I believe it's impact cannot be overstated. Enjoy your much deserved break

[rein...@gmail.com]

Despite what they advertise, Silicon Valley has a long history of fighting hard against change. IBM vs SQL, Xerox vs Apple etc.

https://medium.com/@reinman/its-reboot-time-for-operating-systems-6a516ad8e89c 

[Chris Granger]

Thanks for the kind words everyone - it's greatly appreciated :) In terms of how the runtime works, there's a thread on Reddit asking a bit more about it, so I'll probably reply there over the next couple of days.

Cheers,

Chris.

On Sun, Jan 28, 2018 at 4:42 PM <rein...@gmail.com> wrote:

Despite what they advertise, Silicon Valley has a long history of fighting hard against change. IBM vs SQL, Xerox vs Apple etc.

https://medium.com/@reinman/its-reboot-time-for-operating-systems-6a516ad8e89c 

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[dcoo...@gmail.com]

Just as Bret Victor was able to amplify the work & visions of Alan Kay to new reaches, so have you done. Victor showed us that such things *can* be done, and done well, and be deeply profound. You have taken it a step further, and as av result, countless others are now believing and hungry to further such work.

Well done Chris, you've already succeeded far more than may be immediately apparent. Thank You.

[dcoo...@gmail.com]

(addendum to my recent previous reply)

I am part of a group of individuals who have been individually following the likes of Kay, Victor, and yourself (Chris), and pursuing our own attempts and research to make software more accessible and human-centric (pushing for Kay's computer revolution that "hasn't happened yet").

We were unaware of each other until we responded to the shutdown of VPRI, and came together to form an open-ended collaboration, as an attempt to increase our chances for success through sharing of ideas & projects, and create a wealth of collective insight & resources. Your work has been and will continue to be very influential for us.

I'd like to use this opportunity to seed a continuance of such work and cross-pollination of effort by inviting anyone interested to view or join our collaboration:

https://github.com/d-cook/SomethingNew/blob/master/README.md

For added context, see our email exchanges.

Thanks

[erickn...@gmail.com]

Chris,

Thank you for stepping up and leading. I am very impressed by the progress you and your team have made, and I am sad to see this chapter ending. Here's to your health and wellness, so that you can continue on your journey as you find best.

Best regards,

Eric

On Wednesday, January 24, 2018 at 12:12:30 PM UTC-8, Chris Granger wrote:

[eddypa...@gmail.com]

why is this winding down? I want to know if I am off track. as I have been working on something similar https://youtu.be/GuxWduDNgVM
it is spreadsheet based

[Anton Dyudin]

In short, it's a matter of funding: Eve development was being supported by investors interested in B2B applications, which did not sufficiently materialize on the desired timeline.

[magicmo...@gmail.com]

For those interested in next-gen languages, there is a lively discussion group that includes former Eve team members as well as hundreds of other developers. There are dozens of serious projects underway in this arena (see spreadsheet at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12sTu7RT-s_QlAupY1v-3DfI1Mm9NEX5YMWWTDAKHLfc/edit#gid=0).

The Future of Computing Slack group is located at 

https://join.slack.com/t/futureofcoding/invite/enQtNzk5MTAyNjE3MzUwLWNmMTUxYTQyZWI2NzlmYTVhOTU1OTU5NjNhNGZmMWU1NWQzZDE5MGZiODJmNzljMDYxNWRmMTA4ODM0YTYwZTQ?x=x-p197418537349-500225212578-790459857649

Keep in mind that the largest of the 2 projects, Luna and Red have their own Discord and Slack groups, as they have millions in funding. Most of the other projects are small self-financed efforts.

[magicmo...@gmail.com]

A very cute demo. Certainly there are tens of millions of spreadsheet jockeys who could learn your kind of product. Building a bridge from spreadsheets up to full programming languages is just as valid as the efforts to take programming down to the simplicity of spreadsheets. There is no question in my mind that there is a huge chasm between "regular" programming which sneers at spreadsheets. I know many programmers who refuse to admit spreadsheets are programming, but in my mind if you spend appreciable amounts of time debugging something, you are programming. Debugging is the evidence for programming, not the amount of punctuation and how the code is entered. So what if it gets input into cellular chunks vs. free form words. That is not a semantic difference, just a visual arrangement decision.

[Zubair Quraishi]

Very happy to have been a part of this.... well done Chris!