[Semi OT] The programming language wars

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 21 March 2015 at 21:46:10 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 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.

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.

Same thing is likely to happen with programming, e.g. a different 
models for computation or at least new ways to modify existing 
components. Like neural simulations, adaptive systems, fuzzy 
logic etc...

You also have areas like program synthesis, genetic programming 
etc, where the computer itself generates the program to fit a 
specified result. When the computer is capable of that you might 
have a more "top down" programming model where you just keep 
adding constraints until you are happy with the result.