You may consider this a straw man, but I think that if you look hard at existing programming languages, you'll see that they are all designed for humans, and that the challenge in programming is in formulating your thoughts in a precise fashion. Should languages create higher-level abstractions to allow humans to reason about programs more efficiently? Yes! But that's not what this environment is about.
I think you're on the right track when you said "thoughts in a precise fashion"
Humans don't think in a precise fashion. And that's why I think pattern-matching with "give examples and hope for the best" is a way forward.
Think about how we program. We are given requirements and we noodle about it for a bit and start writing some code that is nowhere close to what the final source will be.
When I think about pattern-matching within the context of Eve, I think of automating the way us, as humans, go about our programming. We have some idea of what we want to do, and typically we need to google stuff for APIs and examples. Let's automate that to a certain extent. Let's use the machine learning advances that have happened in the past decade to automate much of the "research" that we all do when we program.
As a programmer, I'm still surprised how luddite-like we are when it comes to our tools. Many of us still are still in the "programming language + text editor" = "programming".
But most of us use tools to help use look for definitions, to do refactoring, to explore our code base. We need to take that to the next level, where some fuzzy logic is used by our programming systems to say "yeah, I think I know what you mean, are any of these examples close to what you're getting at?"
I think it's all about the tooling these days. We need much more advanced tooling to help us out.
>Think about how we program. We are given requirements and we noodle about it for a bit and start writing some code that is nowhere close to what the final source will be.
That's exactly how I do it. Play around with the problem, and once I've messed with it a bit, take a step back and plan out the right way to do it. Sometimes my "proof of concept" doodling will have salvageable bits. Very rarely (or if it was an easy requirement) the play code will be close to ready. Sometimes, I have to throw it all away. Such is life.
I think you're on the right track when you said "thoughts in a precise fashion"
Humans don't think in a precise fashion. And that's why I think pattern-matching with "give examples and hope for the best" is a way forward.
Think about how we program. We are given requirements and we noodle about it for a bit and start writing some code that is nowhere close to what the final source will be.
When I think about pattern-matching within the context of Eve, I think of automating the way us, as humans, go about our programming. We have some idea of what we want to do, and typically we need to google stuff for APIs and examples. Let's automate that to a certain extent. Let's use the machine learning advances that have happened in the past decade to automate much of the "research" that we all do when we program.
As a programmer, I'm still surprised how luddite-like we are when it comes to our tools. Many of us still are still in the "programming language + text editor" = "programming".
But most of us use tools to help use look for definitions, to do refactoring, to explore our code base. We need to take that to the next level, where some fuzzy logic is used by our programming systems to say "yeah, I think I know what you mean, are any of these examples close to what you're getting at?"
I think it's all about the tooling these days. We need much more advanced tooling to help us out.