The vision here is noble, and I applaud what Chris has done with Light Table, but based on the discussion here, I think the Eve team is setting themselves up for disappointment.

1. By bringing investors on board, and promising Hacker News they're going to change the world, they're basically asking to be stressed out all the time. This is not conducive to innovation.

2. There's a fundamental tension between creating something usable by Joe in accounting and something that is cutting-edge from a technical perspective (highly concurrent etc). 90% of line-of-business programs use less than 10% of CPU, and approximately 0% need high concurrency. Joe in accounting is not going to build the next WhatsApp, and every moment you spend figuring out multi-core whatever, you're not thinking about how to help Joe make his Cash Flow Prediction Tool look slick.

3. From a marketing perspective, creating a new category of software is an enormously difficult undertaking. There are two related problems here:

A. You have to find potential customers. Because nothing like Eve exists, the market does not exist. I.e. the world's "creators" don't all go to the same conferences, visit the same websites, and hang out in the same IRC channels. Light Table at least was addressing an existing market, i.e. "programmers who use X/Y/Z", so you could actually find customers, and they could tell their programmer friends about it.

B. After you find potential customers, you have to educate them, i.e. explain the potential benefits and teach them how to use the darn thing. This requires a major investment from both you and from your interested customers. It is much, much easier to sell something that relieves the customer's pain than something that promises him "superpowers". 95% of "creators" have only vague and incorrect notions about programming, so you'll have a hell of a time explaining the product. Let's say you want to target Joe in accounting: What will the advertisement actually say? "Do you miss VB6?"

4. The fact that the LT team is giving up on Light Table when it's still the proverbial "couple of guys" is not a good sign. From a marketing perspective, Light Table had every advantage in the world: tons of publicity / viral videos, a clearly defined market, and an exciting product that got people talking. The fact that they're throwing in the towel tells me, well, they quit too early, and they'll quit on Eve when the going gets tough.

To be more specific, I think Chris's fears about the market for Light Table are totally unfounded. To wit:

* "The competition has millions of man-hours invested". Who cares? On a day-to-day basis I execute maybe 3% of the code paths in my editor. In my view, Light Table is a classic opportunity to offer 10% of the functionality of the bloated competition but really knock that 10% out of the park. Look at e.g. Pixelmator versus Photoshop or [toot toot] Wizard versus SPSS.

* "Programmers don't pay for software". I'm sorry, but this is a poor excuse, and if I were your drill sergeant, and this were an 80s movie, I'd be screaming in your face right now. Programmers are a wealthy and growing segment. They'll pay for stuff if it helps them get their job done (GitHub, TextMate, books, conferences, heck Visual Studio). Not only that, with the product's positioning, you have a great opportunity to sell to people who want to be programmers, the "ski pants" market, if you will. If you read the comments in this thread, you'll notice that your users are complaining about the Light Table's lack of polish and they clearly recognize the need to pay someone to provide that polish.

In sum, I think the LT team should have worked themselves into a crying, bleeding, starving mess to make Light Table a commercial success, and then pursued bigger ideas once they had the business experience under their belt. Even if it took a few years, they'd be in a much better position both financially and psychologically to tackle a Grand New World-Changing Product once they had the routine down from their Small Life-Changing Editor.

As an indie-app-developer-whatever myself, I would kill for the kind of publicity and market opportunity that Light Table had. I wish Chris & Co. all the best with Eve, and I truly hope they succeed. But based on what I'm reading, I don't think they don't deserve to.