I think there will be types of software that folks will be able to bark orders into their microphone and have the computer barf out software. Maybe an iTunes app creator. "Make it pink! Ok, now put the play bar on the left. No wait, the right. A little more. Good, right there. Now I want my playlist to be black with yellow text and put pretty stars everywhere."
In engineering land, we continue to get better tools for building certain type of applications. Ruby on Rails has shown us the benefits of constrained thinking. A blog in 10 minutes! But Rails only excels at building one type of application, standard fare web apps, with loads of standard database-driven tables/forms.
It's very very hard to generalize programming. We have a long way to go still. Software gets the job done today, but often, it's not pretty and often fights against the user.
"Ok, now put the play bar on the left. No wait, the right. A little more. Good, right there."
Users would put up with this for about 10 seconds before just grabbing the mouse and dragging things where they want them.
I think that's why voice interfaces have not become popular. PC applications tend to be developed for a direct manipulation (window, icon, menu, pointing device) paradigm, so adding a voice interface doesn't help much. A useful voice interface requires an entirely new UI paradigm.
> ... A useful voice interface requires an entirely new UI paradigm.
I think this would require natural language processing far better than what we have now and great deal of contextual knowledge as well as a great deal of "common sense" built into the software (agent? interpreter?). Mice and keyboards remain easier to work with.
In engineering land, we continue to get better tools for building certain type of applications. Ruby on Rails has shown us the benefits of constrained thinking. A blog in 10 minutes! But Rails only excels at building one type of application, standard fare web apps, with loads of standard database-driven tables/forms.
It's very very hard to generalize programming. We have a long way to go still. Software gets the job done today, but often, it's not pretty and often fights against the user.