On Sunday, 22 March 2015 at 10:24:16 UTC, FG wrote:
> On 2015-03-22 at 11:03, "Ola Fosheim =?UTF-8?B?R3LDuHN0YWQi?= <ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang@gmail.com>" wrote:
>> On Sunday, 22 March 2015 at 09:30:38 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
>>> Of course there is. Experience and judgement aren't measurable. You don't have science without numbers.
>>
>> WTF?
>
> Heh, everything is measurable, but sometimes the chosen metrics and analysis are just ridiculous and not worth the paper they are printed on, even though all rules of scientific reasoning were followed. :)

Almost right. Even a well conducted quantitative study might be misleading because it measures correlation and not causality. Causality is hard nut to crack and it will in the end hang on our beliefs in the methodology, the study, the tools, the objects being studied, the people conducting the studies and the "already accepted assumptions in the field" (established theories which might be wrong) etc. So in essence, science is a belief system (not all that different from religion, although the contrary is often claimed).

This all becomes easier to reason about if people give up the idea that science represents "the truth". It does not, it presents models that are hypothetical in nature. These may be useful or not useful, but are usually incomplete and somewhat incorrect... In medical sciences correlation based models can be very useful, or very harmful (when incomplete on critical parameters such as negative effects of radiation).

In the design field the theories used are applied to a future unknown setting so correlation has very low value and insight in causality has a very high value. Meaning: a somewhat flawed high level model about how human beings think and react, about causality, might lead to better design than a more limited and correct low level model of how the brain works based on correlation.

Whether "everything is measurable" depends on what you mean. You might say that qualitative studies involves measuring because everything you perceive are measurements. In the real world, the data (what you have collected) will usually be inadequate for what is being "claimed". After all, it is a society of "publish or perish". So you need many independent studies to get something solid, but how many fields can produce that? Only the big ones, right?

On Friday, 20 March 2015 at 07:37:04 UTC, Paulo  Pinto wrote:
> An example that stuck with me was that languages that follow Algol/Pascal syntax lead themselves to less bugs, than those that follow C like syntax.
>
> There are quite a few other examples. Also the mention that as far as the researcher is aware, only Microsoft is pursuing such studies for language features. Don Syme is in the audience and gives an example how they did it for .NET generics.

Anything wrong with VB.NET?

On Saturday, 21 March 2015 at 19:20:18 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
> On Saturday, 21 March 2015 at 15:51:38 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> I don't expect programming will remain so low level in the future. We are at the infancy of our skills, when comparing with engineerings with a fee centuries of progress.
>>
>> For me the future lyes in something like Wolfram/Mathematic with natural voice processing.
>
> People have been saying this for longer than I'm alive.

You missed my remark about the age of computing versus other arts from engineering.

We are still building bridges with wood and houses with clay.

-
Paulo

On Monday, 23 March 2015 at 10:40:12 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> On Saturday, 21 March 2015 at 19:20:18 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>> On Saturday, 21 March 2015 at 15:51:38 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>>> I don't expect programming will remain so low level in the future. We are at the infancy of our skills, when comparing with engineerings with a fee centuries of progress.
>>>
>>> For me the future lyes in something like Wolfram/Mathematic with natural voice processing.
>>
>> People have been saying this for longer than I'm alive.
>
> You missed my remark about the age of computing versus other arts from engineering.
>
> We are still building bridges with wood and houses with clay.
>
> -
> Paulo

Maybe, and we will certainly see more of this in the future.

However, that future may be far away, considering it is promised for decades at this point and still not up and running.

Also, someone will have to code these systems, so the job we do now will still be necessary.

On Saturday, 21 March 2015 at 20:51:52 UTC, FG wrote:
> But if you look at my function definition, it doesn't have that, nor does it use parentheses, semicolons, etc., so it's "voice-ready". My question is: at which point would that be considered an efficient method to define a program's component that we would choose to use instead of the current succinct symbolic notation?

We will probably keep some variation on the current textual symbolic notation but develop verbal shorthand and IDEs that enable faster programming than even keyboards allow today.

> Yeah, right, people will create drawings with voice commands. :)  Every interface has its rightful domain and voice ain't best for everything. Or do you mean that touch will go away but instead people will be waving their hands around?

Yes, hand and fingers, as I said before, and you will even be able to "paint" in 3D:

https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/573/hands-microsoft-hololens

On Saturday, 21 March 2015 at 21:46:10 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Of course. But we're talking here about interfaces for *programmers*,
> not for your average Joe, for whom a pretty GUI with a button or two
> 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.

> This is the unpopular opinion, but I'm skeptical if this day will ever
> come. The problem with voice recognition is that it's based on natural
> language, and natural language is inherently ambiguous. You say that
> heuristics can solve this, I call BS on that. Heuristics are bug-prone
> and unreliable (because otherwise they'd be algorithms!), precisely
> because they fail to capture the essence of the problem, but are merely
> crutches to get us mostly there in lieu of an actual solution.

You don't have to handle full "natural language" to handle voice input, you can constrain the user to a verbal shorthand for certain tasks.  Eventually, you can loosen that requirement as the recognition engines get better.  You can never have algorithms that handle all the complexity of human speech, especially since the speech recognition engine has no understanding of what the words actually mean.  But thousands upon thousands of heuristics might just do the job.

> The inherent ambiguity in natural language comes not from some kind of
> inherent flaw as most people tend to believe, but it's actually a
> side-effect of the brain's ability at context-sensitive comprehension.
> The exact same utterance, spoken in different contexts, can mean totally
> different things, and the brain has no problem with that (provided it is
> given sufficient context, of course). The brain is also constantly
> optimizing itself -- if it can convey its intended meaning in fewer,
> simpler words, it will prefer to do that instead of going through the
> effort of uttering the full phrase. This is one of the main factors
> behind language change, which happens over time and is mostly
> unconscious.  Long, convoluted phrases, if spoken often enough, tend to
> contract into shorter, sometimes ambiguous, utterances, as long as there
> is sufficient context to disambiguate. This is why we have a tendency
> toward acronyms -- the brain is optimizing away the long utterance in
> preference to a short acronym, which, based on the context of a group of
> speakers who mutually share similar contexts (e.g., computer lingo), is
> unambiguous, but may very well be ambiguous in a wider context. If I
> talk to you about UFCS, you'd immediately understand what I was talking
> about, but if I said that to my wife, she would have no idea what I just
> said -- she may not even realize it's an acronym, because it sounds like
> a malformed sentence "you ...". The only way to disambiguate this kind
> of context-specific utterance is to *share* in that context in the first
> place. Talk to a Java programmer about UFCS, and he probably wouldn't
> know what you just said either, unless he has been reading up on D.

This acronym example is actually fairly easy for the computer to handle, given its great memory.  But yes, there are many contexts where the meaning of the words is necessary to disambiguate what is meant and without some sort of AI, you have to rely on various heuristics.

> The only way speech recognition can acquire this level of context in
> order to disambiguate is to customize itself to that specific user -- in
> essence learn his personal lingo, pick up his (sub)culture, learn the
> contexts associated with his areas of interest, even adapt to his
> peculiarities of pronunciation. If software can get to this level, it
> might as well pass the Turing test, 'cos then it'd have enough context
> to carry out an essentially human conversation.  I'd say we're far, far
> from that point today, and it's not clear we'd ever get there.

I'd say we're fairly close, given the vast computing power in even our mobile devices these days, and that is nowhere near the Turing test, as extracting a bunch of personalized info and contextual dictionaries is nowhere close to the complexity of a computer generating a human-like answer to any question a human asks it.

> We haven't even mastered context-sensitive languages, except via the crutch
> of parsing a context-free grammar and then apply a patchwork of semantic
> analysis after the fact, let alone natural language, which is not only
> context-sensitive but may depend on context outside of the input
> (cultural background, implicit common shared knowledge, etc.). Before we
> can get there, we'd have to grapple with knowledge representation,
> context-sensitive semantics, and all those hard problems that today seem
> to have no tractable solution in sight.

Certain of these can be dealt with by heuristics, others are too hard to deal with right now, but likely wouldn't make much of a difference in accuracy anyway.

> P.S. Haha, it looks like my Perl script has serendipitously selected a
> quote that captures the inherent ambiguity of natural language -- you
> can't even tell, at a glance, where the verbs are! I'd like to see an
> algorithm parse *that* (and then see it fall flat on its face when I
> actually meant one of the "non-standard" interpretations of it, such as
> if this were in the context of a sci-fi movie where there are insects
> called "time flies"...).

It took me a minute to even figure out what "Fruit flies like a banana" meant, as that pair of sentences takes advantage of the human heuristic of assuming that two rhyming sentences place their verb in the same spot.  But a speech recognition engine doesn't _need_ to parse the grammar in those sentences, as it'll likely get it just from the pronunciation, so it would likely confuse only us humans, who are trying to understand what it actually means, and not the computer, which just wants to transcribe literally what we said.

On Saturday, 21 March 2015 at 22:00:21 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> Right, but it is likely that the nature of programming will change. In the beginning of the web the search engines had trouble matching anything but exact phrases, now they are capable of figuring out what you probably wanted.
>
> Take music composition, people still write notes explicitly as discrete symbols, yet others compose music by recording a song, and then manipulating it (i.e. auto tune). So, even though you can do pitch recognition many probably use discrete interfaces like keyboard or a mouse for writing music, yet new forms of music and composition has come with the ability to process audio in a more intuitive, evolutionary fashion.

Good point, this was a good video from a couple years ago:

http://forum.dlang.org/thread/op.wn0ye9uy54xghj@puck.auriga.bhead.co.uk

On Saturday, 21 March 2015 at 23:58:18 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> HS Teoh is right about context, and the superiority of the written word for organizing and expressing thinking at a very high level.  The nature of human memory and perception means that is unlikely to change very soon, if ever.

Nobody is arguing against text, but of the best way to provide it to the computer, whether through tapping keys or voicing it.

On Sunday, 22 March 2015 at 09:30:38 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
> On Friday, 20 March 2015 at 22:55:24 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>> There is nothing intrinsically more scientific about basing a decision on a study rather than experience and judgement (including aesthetic judgement), which is not to say that more data cannot be useful,
>
>
> Of course there is. Experience and judgement aren't measurable. You don't have science without numbers.

But it takes experience and judgement to interpret and contextualize those numbers, so we are back to square one. :) Note that Laeeth specifically said more data can be useful, only that one has to be careful that it's the right data, not just data that happens to be lying around.

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.

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.

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.

On Mon, 30 Mar 2015 18:49:00 +0000, 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.

that would be a big day!