watching fun fun function today we are
exploring the eve programming language
also in case you haven’t already noticed
I have a bit of a golf air hair color
thing going on and the reason for that
is that today is the day after Halloween
I also still have like this residue like
black makeup residue inside of my my
ears
I am also as a result hungover from sad
hello in my energy levels are like so
today we’re just gonna do something
relaxing we’re gonna check out Eve a new
hipstery programming language that I’ve
been watching for a while and I wanted
to get into and Whitney you know what
are you just gonna have a good time so
what is Eve four years ago ah fantastic
weird and wondrous guy called Brett
Victor me to talk that he was titled
inventing on principle I’ve linked it
below and you should absolutely watch it
but the TLDR is that Brett lecture is an
X Apple engineer and it tends to invent
these amazing UI concepts and in this
particular talk he he explores the idea
of tools that give you an immediate
feedback to what you’re doing so in the
talk is made a couple of very cool
prototypes to demonstrate the ideas that
he has he shows this pretty cool
animation software with some very
innovative thoughts but the real cool
thing that he shows is this conceptual
programming environment that gives you
immediate feedback to what you’re doing
and allows you to do all kinds of cool
things like try and travel debugging and
stuff when I saw this talk I got really
excited about there being a very
different fundamentally different
way of doing software development I
think that the evolution of software
development tools has been pretty slow
in the in the last last ten years or
perhaps are slow but very very
incremental it doesn’t feel like anyone
has rethought how we do things from a
creative standpoint I feel like
programmers are still stuck in the same
Dark Ages that video editors were in
before you had digital editing so before
we had software’s like Final Cut and
iMovie and no premiere and before movies
were digital what you had to do is that
you had to take film strips and you
would have to like physically cut them
with a knife and then tape them together
it’s like that’s how you did editing and
once you’ve done that you would put it
into the back into the machine and look
through it and then you would realize oh
we should probably tremolo and then you
would have to cut them up again and then
put it back together and then put it
back into the machine that is very
cumbersome compared to how it is today
when you can just no no you just drag
the clips and you trim them a little and
you can play immediately no rendering
times or anything it just boom place you
exactly what you need and you can scrub
back and forth and see exactly where to
make the cut it’s very very interactive
but programming is absurdly enough stuck
in in this old world when you make a
change in your code there’s almost
always quite a bit of some kind of
compilation time or loading time or
something even if you have a fancy
library loading environment it’s very
rare that you have really like a
feedback cycle that is less than one
second and with native mobile
development it’s not at all uncommon
with build times that are up to a minute
long or even longer and even if you have
an environment where you actually
managed to set up a very fast save
reload compile push
show the application loop the
application will still reset its state
every time so let’s say that you have a
bog where that arises when you open a
menu and then click a thing and then add
another thing in that thing there’s a
couple of steps involved to reproduce
the bug so while you’re trying to fix
this when you make an edit you have to
wait for the thing to reload and then
you have to manually go through and
click and open the menu and then add
that thing and then do that thing and
see if your fix worked so for most
developers modern development tooling is
not like the tooling that professional
video editors has today it’s more like
the tooling that video editors had
before digital tooling existed when they
had to know do little cut there and then
you put it in and then they had to look
at the movie from start to finish in
order to see where if their edit was
good or not I really think that there is
a future where we can do better and
Brett Victor in his talk really showed a
hint of that future even though it was
just a prototype a couple of months
after that talk was released a developer
called Chris Granger is an X Microsoft
dude
he released lighttable which was a tiny
prototype app and a blog post and a
video demonstrating a real
implementation of the of the the
principles that Breck vector had shown
in his talk
it was an amazing proof-of-concept and
people were very excited and Chris
eventually ended up creating a
Kickstarter to fund the development of
light table I was a backer of this
campaign because I was super excited and
the campaign got funded and also Y
Combinator went in to fund the company
as well so the project has been very
well funded even since its inception
light table was a really fun project to
follow but eventually the
started to you know wine down and
nothing much happened and I just figured
that yeah well but a few months later
Eve arrives on the scene which is like
the next step in the evolution of this
thinking process so even is not an
editor or an IDE it’s actually a
programming language and a platform and
an editor rolled into one I realize that
this kind of tooling is very
controversial to a lot of people
although people are very fond of their
specific setup and their tooling and
that is fine but Eve has so many
interesting ideas that I think that we
should put those aside for a little bit
and allow ourselves to explore what Eve
has to say because even if we decide not
to use Eve I think that there is a lot
of things that can be learned from Eve
that we can bring back to our home
programming environments and to willings
and programming languages Eve has some
very interesting design principles so it
first of all it’s a literal programming
language or perhaps it’s called literate
programming I’m not sure I the main idea
is that you write your program sort of
like sort of like a document an Eve
program doesn’t look like a normal
program the source code it reads more
like a programming article on medium
it’s it’s flowing flowing text in
English and then there are blocks inside
it with the actual code so let me show
you an example this is the this is the
EEP programming environment you’re it’s
available with some examples at play
with Eve calm or you can run this
locally yourself it’s open source and
it’s it’s just an implementation of
a flappy bird kind of game that I just
click here and yes you know I’m supposed
to not to hit the pipes and yeah game
over on the left-hand side here you see
the source code so to speak of the
flappy eve program so it’s these header
nice headers and markdown blocks and
which explains what the software is
about and yeah the Harris is set up and
here is some code I scroll down a bit
and you see that all here some more code
blocks and they describe my control the
game world and here’s the game menus it
explains how this works you also noticed
that it the the programming language
language is very very terrorist it’s not
a lot of code here to make make this
game it’s pretty impressive how
expressive this language is and I want
to stress that this is the actual
programming environment let’s see if I
can introduce an error here or something
if I did this yeah alright you see that
I get error messages in line here and I
just changed it and it works what it’s
also cool about Eve is that everything
is centered around data I often feel
like in an object-oriented programming
languages like a lot of programming
tends to get in the way you have to
create objects and then you have to
create factories and then you have to
create factories for factories and then
you have to create design patterns in
order to yeah you know like there’s a
lot of stuff and functional programming
languages also tend to have a lot of
this fluff it’s there’s monads and
there’s there’s partials and this
currying it’s a lot like that it’s not
about the data that you’re actually
manipulating and an aim is very focused
on the data so pretty much everything in
EVE is a record and records they look
like this this is a record the first
thing that happens here is that we
commit a for records here too to our
game world let’s have a look at this
second line here
this is our record and records when I
first saw them I felt like they had a
lot of similarities to the object
literals in in JavaScript you know like
this world thing here this would have
been written like screen menu if this
I’m just making this up like this is not
few of a script but if it was I would
take the frame here and paste it in like
you can see the similarities here right
I’m gonna delete that so just like
object literals in JavaScript these
properties they are not not ordered in a
way so if I move move this code move out
here and movies before distance that’s
the same objective that’s the that is
valid just like JavaScript object
literals what confused me was these
these hash tag world thinnest they look
weird and I didn’t really understand
what they were first but they are
actually a shorthand for writing tag
world see that’s the same thing it’s
just syntactic sugar if I do the same
thing for this one obstacle the record
below it would be tag string or star
call same thing here this is this is
exactly the same thing as writing tag
obstacle I’m gonna revert that back to
the tag syntax there and the reason why
there’s a shorthand for tag is that tags
are used a ton in the e programming
language let’s go down a little bit here
to drawing the game world what is really
cool about Eve is that it is a very
simple programming language this not a
lot of things you need to learn to use
it and that is partially because it’s a
it’s a young programming language in
javascript was very simple from the
beginning but now we have generators and
we have arrow functions and we have
three different ways of declaring
variables there’s many different ways of
creating objects and lalalalala but eve
has only two operations basically
looking at records in writing to records
order and we look for Eckert’s by using
search and here we assign to the
variable world every record that matches
this pattern and remember that this
thing here this is the same thing as
writing tag world it’s just for time for
that
and I’m gonna write go up here and write
this out again to remind you of this tag
world so up here we have committed this
record and this search operation here
will as soon as one of those records
appear it’s going to slurp that up and
for every every world that it sees every
world record that is going to be
assigned to the world variable and then
it’s going to proceed executing this
block and reverse this this happens for
every world we only have one world here
but if we had multiple of them like
these obstacles here for example these
are multiple obstacles that are being
committed as records to the game world
then this this search operation would
match all of them and it would design it
would run through this thing for every
every one of those records a subtle
thing is that these things here like the
blocks are not necessarily executed in
order this might be executed after this
block for instance like the ordering of
these blocks does not really matter to
eat ordering of
coleus doesn’t have much of a
consequence in Eve because everything
executes as everything is reactive
basically so this thing will execute as
soon as there is any change to the
record set set of records in the
database that are tagged with world so
as soon as this block here it has a
world before this this commit line here
is is executed this code will basically
not proceed so the first time this code
is running we won’t really see a world
and this block will not execute it won’t
will not will not continue so search is
kind of like this filter or kind of like
an events kind of sort of like an event
listener maybe
and this is the callback to that event
listener kind of so once we have our
world will proceed to this commit block
here commit blocks they write records
search observes records according to a
pattern and commit blocks they write
records and commit blocks can operate on
a database in this case the database is
the browser database and the database
and Eve is I guess kind of like I
interpreted as just a bucket where you
can put records and the browser database
it is observed by some browser bindings
that Eve has and that is what is drawing
things on screen so you actually don’t
manipulate the Dom directly in Eve
instead you write and create records in
the browser database so here I not
completely sure what is going on here
this here is a if you look at this this
is a div record right so this is again
just a record with a tag name of
but it’s syntactic sugar for that and a
div whenever browser sees a record with
what divs it’s going to draw those draw
those to the screen and whenever eve
sees records dave records div div
records with with the tag div written to
the browser database it’s going to draw
the equivalent equivalent divs to the
Dom in in the actual browser so you see
here that this is basically as Dom it
has style and you see here again just
like Java Script object literals Eve
records can contain other Eve records so
this style attribute here it contains
yet another record inside of it is user
select and it has some Java is CSS and
some fancy CSS and some some SVG
children I guess that this okay this is
the game window this is some kind of
rectangle this is this is an image this
is okay this is the background and then
there’s some other rectangle I don’t
know exactly what these things are but
it’s stuff that is being drawn to this
SVG on the screen this little buddy here
this is a merge operator so what that
means is that all this stuff here this
this div which contains all of all these
children I think that this is all just
one big div that is being merged into
the world record so I guess that world
record will also get a tag damn this
thing confuses me a bit perhaps somebody
that is more familiar with Eve can can
explain it or somebody that can just
read docs unlike me like are you feel
confused about the fact
that records can have multiple tags to
me that is unnatural perhaps it’s just
because I think of them too much as
JavaScript JavaScript objects but I
don’t know it’s just weird but I think
that this results in in the world
getting all of this stuff inside of its
world is is actually both the div and
the director that maintains stuff like
gravity and frame not entirely sure so
when I see them merch operating I tend
to think a little bit of object or
design in in JavaScript or the dot dot
dot operator in year 7 what else should
we check out we can check out how score
calculation works that’s pretty
interesting
do you see here like remember the the
search operator search toaster thing
search if I scroll up again and see like
here where we drew the game world here
we were basically just let me as change
that back to the original – yes world
here we were searching for records that
were had the tag world but you can like
this this pattern can be be much more
than that you can see here like in the
score calculation here we also add
distance here to the pattern and this
means that this this bind block here
that is associated with the search will
execute every time we get a world with a
new distance so as soon as distance
updates on the world this bind block
will be rung for that world you see the
bind here it updates the world’s the
world’s score this operator here that
means to set
this attribute on on the world object
and it just takes the the distance of
love the world basically how far we’ve
gotten with our flappy flappy bird and
then we assign that to the score after
we floor it so that we don’t get get
decimals this is by the way how you call
functions in and I haven’t gotten too
much into that yet sort of fully
understand it but there is a bunch of
built-in functions in in even they look
like this you just call floor and then
these these brackets here so you don’t
use parenthesis like you was doing in
most programming languages and that is
actually to emphasize the fact that
functions are also records in in eve so
it’s not a functional oriented
programming language it’s actually a
record oriented programming language I
guess or perhaps pattern based also a
thing that I really like is that
function arguments or they are not
ordered so in most programming languages
nor would have like there would be value
one value two and so forth like they it
would just be like the order of the
parameters determine what what’s value
it was but in in EVE this all of it is
again records so you see here like
distance is being assigned to the
parameter value that is being passed to
floor so if it had any more parliaments
that you would have to pass the floor
like say o to one or something and you
would assign that value here so you can
always infer infer what the hell is
going into the the function without
actually going into looking at the
method the function signature you can
even see it just by looking at it which
is very nice you see how that we use
buying the key
to change the score and up here we use
commit I’m not completely sure about the
difference between two I know that bind
is aware of the lifecycle of of the
records that it’s matching while commit
just just does whatever thing it does
permanently so if there is a record that
is it’s going to disappear after after a
while they will still these these
records that commit crates will still
persist while stuff that for instance
here like the browser is binding the
screen menu thing it will add these
these text items here but as soon as
this stops matching these records will
also also also die bind basically sort
of matches in life cycle or of the
objects that it’s matched so if it
creates them they will also have a short
life cycle I’m not completely sure still
figuring this out I’m not even sure if
this is a good way to program but I’m
very excited about it somehow it’s just
so different and intriguing and it’s
your fun it makes my brain go all tingly
good good good I encourage you all to go
to play with Eve Tom and as soon as you
do you will end up at this this
QuickStart which is actually an editable
environment is pretty cool so if I
remove this and it will updates over
here see or I can just stop stop stop
stop stop tonight I run again in updates
and it will walk you through the basic
concepts of records and clocks and teach
you how to write an application Soria
Eve pattern-matching cool programming
language you should check it out
you have just watched an episode of fun
fun function I release these every month
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me
I am mgj until next Monday morning stay tuned