A team spent years raising funds and developing first Light Table, then Eve, only to walk away with apologies. Why does this make me frustrated? Does the team owe those who pitched money into this (I wasn't one because I didn't know of Light Table at the time) a show of commitment to their product? I can't help but think of the bad will Google garnered shutting down beloved products, such as Inbox and Reader. That bad will will take decades to repair, perhaps longer.
I am not making any personal attacks: I am only curious at the way I feel knowing two projects were shuttered before they really had their chance to live.
I won't speak for the rest of the team, but walking away from Eve is unquestionably the hardest thing I have ever had to do. We were given a once in a lifetime chance to reinvent the way we build software, with the only constraints being our imagination and the clock imposed by our runway. I think by the end we were tantalizingly close to success too. Many of the tools we made were significantly more productive for certain domains of work. Unfortunately, close doesn't cut it in a startup, and despite many, many sleepless nights pushing we weren't able to tie a single cohesive product together that was both better enough and general enough.
You might argue that we should have settled on one of our iterations that was close rather than continuing the search for something better. I can't really disagree with that except to say that each of the latest prototypes was such a large improvement over the last that it felt irresponsible to stop short.
Unfortunately, we've had to find work that would keep a roof over our heads, but that doesn't mean we've buried the work we've done. We've open sourced Light Table and every iteration of Eve that was remotely useful, and we've worked hard to share the most important things we learned on the journey with those who might continue it through essays, speaking, and thorough commenting in the most interesting sections of our code. Nothing would make me happier than having someone take inspiration from our attempt and build the future of programming before I have the financial freedom to return to working on it.
Like everyone at Kodowa, I just want to live in the world where those tools exist. I am sad that we weren't able to complete them in the short time that we had, but I am not sad that we tried.
It takes courage to aim big and risk failure, so I applaud the effort behind LightTable and Eve.
For all the effort invested to not be in vain, it is important for the community to be able to learn (generalizable) lessons from these failures. Hence the typical focus on putting out a product, even if not complete, and publishing a paper, to close out a line of research.
When I try to look for an understandable summary of lessons learned from LT/Eve, I get the feeling that the tidbits are a little scattered, and not quite in a form manifestly usable by the community. Have you solicited suggestions about how this could be improved? For starters, it would be great if there could be a centralized repository listing all the various blog posts, talks, etc during the evolution of LT/Eve and the retrospectives. If that already exists, it would be great to publicize it more, and the community could organize around that and discuss how to take it further. There's a lot of excitement about the direction LT/Eve pioneered and it would be good to harness it for the next round of attempts :-)
Also, I don't mean to imply that the LT/Eve team has not done that -- eg: thanks for open sourcing LT! I'm just thinking out loud about how to better pass on the less tangible learnings.
I like your work, but think the main problem (that I relate) is the look for the "just better" version.
I'm also on the dream of build a relational lang (http://tablam.org) but tied to a more practical concern: How move all my data/processing logic that I have around dozen languages and frameworks so i can do a medium size ERP. In fact, I do "erp-like" modules all my life and it getting harder and costlier with the explosion on targets and needs.
I think you must have focused in a "sqlite-like" version that can be integrated inside any project. (this, btw, is my goal). Also, this kind of project was made for the traditional enterprise/financial customer. You could have some chance there, IMHO.
I read a little of the big post, I see that you get scared when Apple and others start using the ideas of yours seriously. I commit the same mistake years ago. Is true that have a big gorilla in your same space means it will eat a big pie of the market fast, but not matter what, the gorilla is never as good as the one with a more clear idea. And you can take a part of the slice just for be the ones to fall back when the gorilla-solution blow in the customers faces.
Part of my life is take over after a "big-project" and do something for real.
It's not like they didn't deliver at all, though. They raised funding for Light Table via Kickstarter, and they then delivered Light Table. I don't think that the $316k raised should require perpetual commitment from Chris Granger. He put in a ton of work, and released it. LT is available, and it's open source, so anyone who wants to contribute to it can do so. But based on the amount of activity it has seen, it appears that for the most part, people either aren't willing or aren't able to contribute.
As for Eve - the people who invested in it are professionals. They knew going in that programming languages and tools are tough to monetize. I think that the level of commitment shown and the releases of Eve that were delivered are reasonable considering the amount of money that was invested.
Speaking as one of the investors in Eve myself (Zubair, the guy mentioned in the video), I agree with this comment. Of course I would have loved it if they had continued with Eve, but it is very hard to monetize programming tools, especially when the vision is as big as the one that the Eve team had, as so many different pieces of programming had to fall in place.
Anyway, they inspired so many others who are now working on reactive programming and they showed the market that there is interest in other models of computation, so I see their work as spawning 1000s of others interested in democratising programming.
And yes, I was a professional investor in the past, so we know the risks :)
A few developers stand on the shoulders of giants and try to see the future so they can shove the state of the art forward a little bit.
Some developers stand in the footprints of giants and complain about the view.
Many developers stand in the footprints of giants, don't realize they're standing in footprints, and will argue very loudly that the particular muddy footprint they're stuck in is amazing, and you're an idiot if you disagree.
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I admire group #1. And I don't blame group #2. You've got to pay the bills somehow, and most people can't afford to join group #1.
To put this in perspective, Light Table raised $316,720 on Kickstarter. Google gets that much money every 75 seconds. You can't really compare Google's decisions to those of a single person working on an experimental project with a tiny budget.
I'll take a bold guess and say that it makes you frustrated, because you've never worked on anything very difficult, and as a result, have unrealistic expectations of what that process is actually like.
The folks behind LightTable/Eve have a commitment to living their life as they see fit. That's it. They had some ideas they wanted to work on. If you want to support creative people doing creative things, you give them money.
That's it. If you want creativity, you have to give and not expect anything in return and when it works out, that's great!
You may be confused by established companies that were once creative, now doing incremental improvements every year, selling it as creative work. It creates an unrealistic expectation of what the creative process is actually like - full of things that didn't work.
I'm not so sure about Eve and Light Table, but I do love a transcript. Even a lousy, raw, automated transcript like this is faster to read and more memorable than a video.
Fortunately, in this case, the page is being generated by a simple function that reads the YouTube format — so you can paste in the text, and create (and quickly publish) a transcript for any YouTube video you please:
In my opinion, the best bits were those which focused on the learnings and lessons of the experience. While the startup narrative was interesting, I would have loved to have gone deeper into the conclusions of Chris and the rest in retrospect.
Excellent talk! I always admired the Eve guys as they had the ability to build things I could imagine, but I never had the skills to actually make myself
I am not making any personal attacks: I am only curious at the way I feel knowing two projects were shuttered before they really had their chance to live.