Saturday, June 9, 2007

I want it, NOW



While Minority Report made the interface popular, this story talks about how it is in existence now. It backs up what Microsoft is doing (posted here).




So is Microsoft the first vendor to sell this? More research will be needed to check on that. Right now, it appears defense applications are the only places where it will be used. Which means commercial applications will be years behind--except for Microsoft, that is. But their offering is so expensive as to be out of reach for most of us.


But the trend is clear: as computers have moved through time, the interface has looked less and less like code and command lines and more intuitive, based on the way we interact with our world around us. There is but one downside to this: the number of people who will be able to do the coding will continue to decrease, as few people will have the skills to code. The only way to avoid this is to improve the languages themselves. Even if many business applications still exist and still run that are based on COBOL, COBOL is as evil as it can be, so I am more than happy to leave it in the dust heap of time.