What Eve is

From a technical standpoint, Eve is a variant of Datalog, which means that it's a database as much as it is a general purpose programming language. Being explicitly designed for data transformation, there are somethings that Eve will particularly excel at:

• Any program that would normally connect to a datastore (websites, business software, visualizations, analytics)
• Services and pipelines that are largely about translating one form of data into another
• Anything you might consider "glue"
• Any program that makes heavy use of graphs

Right now though, Eve won't be good at any of those things. While everything we've shown is real, Eve is still very early. It can't handle large amounts of data or hundreds of blocks. There's very little in the way of standard library and like any newly minted language, it's certainly not something you should try to use in production yet. But with all of that being said, this isn't just a demo. As full of bugs as it may be, this is Eve 0.2.0. The implementation will continue to improve rapidly and as we approach our second big milestone, the platform should be more stable and a whole lot more useful.

Just because Eve is early doesn't mean it should be discounted, though. There's lots to explore - from what it's like to program in a language without inherent order to writing programs with no loops. Eve has a lot to offer and demonstrates a very powerful form of programming; one that we believe will help shape the future of our profession.

What Eve isn't

As much as we'd like to tell you otherwise, it won't make your coffee and it won't replace all of programming. It is one tool of the many that will need to exist and there are somethings that Eve won't be good at any time soon, if ever:

• Anything that needs to talk explicitly about the machine like writing an operating system or firmware.
• Hard real-time systems like syncing wireless speakers or real-time control mechanisms in robots.
• High Performance Computing (HPC), e.g. large matrix computations or heavily linear algorithms.

It's also worth talking about the fact that Eve in its current form isn't sufficient for non-programmers. This version is still very much programming, but it had so much to offer that we didn't want to keep it locked away. We know that Eve will have to evolve before it's ready for a general audience, but what's there now should help make things more accessible.