I was just reading about Light Table's denouement and how Eve was in a way its successor, and now I find Eve has gone about the same way. It looks like both projects foundered because the problems they addressed --- representing code in non-linear ways with changes live-propagating through the system's state --- are very, very hard, apparently harder than Chris et al. realized.
In retrospect, their harsh words about our current languages and tools representing a 1970s mindset come across as hubris.
> In retrospect, their harsh words about our current languages and tools representing a 1970s mindset come across as hubris.
Nah, I think the hubris is thinking you could make a business with a near-horizon payoff fixing the problem they accurately identified.
I can't think of any “build a new language” startups that have succeeded (I'm sure there's one out there somewhere, though.) Getting a language established is a long slog, unless you've got a mega-user as a partner from day one, which mostly happens when the project is developed internally by that mega-user.
As a KS backer of Light Table I always get sad about what might have been[1] if they hadn't gone the YC + VC route that basically lead to abandoning LT before it was near ready for daily use for most of us.
We never did get to see the vision that was presented in that KS...
[1] 2012 was two years before Brackets/Atom and three before VSCode.
> We never did get to see the vision that was presented in that KS...
When we produced this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWAMr72VaaU) for the v0.2 release, we actually went though the LT kickstarter video and tried to deliver on the promises made there. I think at one point in the office we had them going side by side, showing the promise in LT and the reality in Eve.
IIRC Eve was developed by a startup, and they stopped development because they couldn't find a business model to fund it, not because of problems with the language.
(Hopefully the community will keep it alive, I enjoyed playing around with it and I think the programming model might be onto something)
In retrospect, their harsh words about our current languages and tools representing a 1970s mindset come across as hubris.