On Monday, 30 March 2015 at 18:49:01 UTC, Joakim wrote:
On Sunday, 29 March 2015 at 21:17:26 UTC, Abdulhaq wrote:
On Sunday, 29 March 2015 at 18:27:51 UTC, Joakim wrote:
would suffice.
When you said "I think rodent-based UIs will go the way of
the dinosaur," you seemed to be talking about more than just
programmers.
I'm still waiting for The Last One (from Feb 1981) to reach
fruition:
http://www.tebbo.com/presshere/html/wf8104.htm
http://teblog.typepad.com/david_tebbutt/2007/07/the-last-one-pe.html
Once finished, there will be no more need to write any
programs.
Heh, that article is pretty funny. :) In the comments for the
second link, the lead programmer supposedly said, "For me TLO
remains the 1st ever programming wizard. Wrongly advertised and
promoted, but inherentlyt a 'good idea'." Considering how
widespread wizards are in Windows these days, the idea has
certainly done well.
I do think that that concept of non-technical users providing
constraints and answering questions is the future of building
software, it just can't be built by one isolated guy. The
configuration and glue code can be auto-generated, but there
will likely always need to be core libraries written in a
programming language by programmers. But the same automation
that has put most travel agents out of work will one day be
applied to most programmers too.
It was such an exciting time back then, but most of us who had a
clue knew that it certainly couldn't be done (at that time,
anyway). Around about the same time there was another article in
PCW (a great magazine by the way) about a data compression tool
that you could rerun over and over again to make files smaller
and smaller ;-). I wish we could read the back issues like we can
with Byte (on archive,org). Even the adverts are great to read
for us old hands.
As to whether we'll ever do it, I agree with previous comments
that it's related to understanding language - context is
everything, and that takes an understanding of life and its
paraphernalia.
