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Imagine living back at this time, and seeing the advancement of computers. It's not hard to imagine that natural language programming and real artificial intell

by csours 9y ago

Imagine living back at this time, and seeing the advancement of computers. It's not hard to imagine that natural language programming and real artificial intelligence would not be far off. Science fiction of the period had entire economies planned and administered by computer. Of course, that didn't happen, but it gets me thinking about what we imagine won't be far off from today. For myself, I imagine ubiquitous implanted health monitors and advanced computer/brain direct interfaces. What do you imagine we will see "just around the corner"?

pjmlp 9y ago
Bret Victor has a wonderful talk (The future of programming), where he pretends to be in the 60's with all the research going on with Lisp, Algol, Fortran, and looking towards the future. Needless to say, none of the positive predictions turned out as expected.
- EvanAnderson 9y ago
  In case anybody is interested in that talk here's the notes and a link to the video: http://worrydream.com/dbx/ http://worrydream.com/dbx/
- csours 9y ago
  I wonder how many of these didn't work out because they didn't scale well to real world complexity.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    The reasons are more to do with political interests and willingness to invest into specific technologies. For example, do you think the whole Web 2.0 with JavaScript everywhere would ever taken off if it wasn't for companies with the engineering resources of Microsoft, Google, Apple and Mozilla into fighting for JIT performance? Without it, JavaScript would still be used for form validations and dummy page animations. Or Java on Android, with Google's goal of making it succeed whatever it takes. It is all a matter how much money a company is willing to spend into making something become reality.
    - jacobush 9y ago
      No, not really, at all. Natural language programming and strong A.I. are vastly different than the Node.js framework of the week. These things you mention, Javascript, Java, Android etc are like toys. You argue that the toy makers just as easily could have produced the equivalent of a Moon rocket program, if only they had spent money on that. I am not convinced.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]

by csours 9y ago

pjmlp 9y ago

Bret Victor has a wonderful talk (The future of programming), where he pretends to be in the 60's with all the research going on with Lisp, Algol, Fortran, and looking towards the future. Needless to say, none of the positive predictions turned out as expected.

EvanAnderson 9y ago
In case anybody is interested in that talk here's the notes and a link to the video: http://worrydream.com/dbx/ http://worrydream.com/dbx/
csours 9y ago
I wonder how many of these didn't work out because they didn't scale well to real world complexity.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  The reasons are more to do with political interests and willingness to invest into specific technologies. For example, do you think the whole Web 2.0 with JavaScript everywhere would ever taken off if it wasn't for companies with the engineering resources of Microsoft, Google, Apple and Mozilla into fighting for JIT performance? Without it, JavaScript would still be used for form validations and dummy page animations. Or Java on Android, with Google's goal of making it succeed whatever it takes. It is all a matter how much money a company is willing to spend into making something become reality.
  - jacobush 9y ago
    No, not really, at all. Natural language programming and strong A.I. are vastly different than the Node.js framework of the week. These things you mention, Javascript, Java, Android etc are like toys. You argue that the toy makers just as easily could have produced the equivalent of a Moon rocket program, if only they had spent money on that. I am not convinced.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]