Microsoft Launching New Programming Language Called ‘D’, No it’s Not a Joke
Apparently it would be quite useful for normal people to be able to tell computers to do things with words instead of clicking on things. Surely they are wrong.
February 6, 2008
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As noted by a commentator (commenter?), D is the name of an existing programming language. There’s also the realm of what’s called “natural language processing” which this seems to overlap on a bit. Not sure about this “end-user programming” moniker, seems gimmicky to me.
Then again, I remember when I switched from C++ to Visual Basic and wondered why anyone would bother to develop Windows (3.1!) applications when they ran approximately 100x slower than C/C++ apps. The only thing was that it *seemed” faster to develop in VB, and you could have lots of pretty things at a relatively small time cost. MS are good at targetting the wider, lazier base at the end-product’s expense, and building on top of that. While VB is all but dead now, these efforts all led to C# which is now quite popular.
I imagine a lot of punchcard and assembly programmers feel another generation older when they read these articles. There was a time when memory capacity and processor power was at a premium - but now that it’s not really an issue (computing power seems to have outstripped our average need of it), it’s easy to be complacent about how well your application does what it does. You don’t need under-the-hood elegance anymore (ho ho, right iTunes?).
I love the idea of NLP. Did you see Heston Blumenthal’s TV show where he turned his kitchen into a sweet shop because that’s the way he feels there? He also did this seafood dish which he served with an MP3 player that had sounds of the sea to help you enjoy your delicious (and very expensive) seafood dish.
Are you talking about neuro-linguistic programming?
Haha, yeah sorry, the words said ‘natural langue processing’ but my tiny mind read ‘Nearo-Linguistic Programming’.