As programmers, I think we're way too stuck to the idea that programming is a keyboard and mouse exercise when we are trying to envision the future. Like many o

As programmers, I think we're way too stuck to the idea that programming is a keyboard and mouse exercise when we are trying to envision the future. Like many other people, I've been struggling with carpal tunnel during the pandemic and I've switched to dictation based coding. Since making the switch, I've realized how much of how I code is specifically due to the keyboard being my way to tell the computer things. And graphical programming paradigms that I've seen are really just switching from keyboard to keyboard + mouse. Right now, dictation is still at the point where it's a royal pain in the ass to have it as the primary input method. As soon as that changes, I expect that we will see a flurry of new programming paradigms. Code is best represented as text when it is input (and modified!) as text. My current dictation set up includes lots of it asking me "did you mean X,Y, or Z" and as natural language processing improves, those questions are going to get a lot more interesting. Even if NLP weren't going to improve, dictation+keyboard+mouse(+touchscreen+eyetracking ...) based programming will probably be a very different experience from keyboard+mouse based programming. Until then, I really only expect incremental change.