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Conditional Action Programmer

conditionalactionprogrammer.com

92 pointspavanlimo64 comments

I'm always a little miffed when I see natural language being the input, because now in order to use the tech I need to also play the "guess the verb" games.

This is especially bad in Wolfram Alpha.... I can clearly see that all parts of a query are supported but I have to get the NLP part to parse my sentences right. Though there is Mathematica I guess....

Not that I dislike all natural language stuff (far from it) but I'd love to have access to an AST builder too

I generally agree, but there are some cases where I've found natural language actually is the right interface. And complex interfaces with lots of touch points but a simple underlying principle seems to be that sweet spot.

For example, I exclusively use Siri to set reminders for times and places, because to do so using a typical touch interface is much more painful.

Whether or not this CAP idea will meet the bar is an open question for me.

I find it telling that your comparison is to touch interfaces. The (unintentional?) inference being that only touch interfaces are painful enough that current generation NLP can compete with them.

I use keyboard and mouse for setting reminders. The app I really miss now I don't have a smartphone is google maps.

If you don't have a smartphone it will be difficult for you to do this, but try creating a time- or location-based reminder using a keyboard interface. And I'm generously assuming that you're going to run this test at a computer, and not directly after bumping into someone in the hallway who reminds you about something you need to do.

This is a bit off-topic from the CAP thing, where I think it's reasonable assume that you are at a computer.

I'd like a language with "natural language" as a first class citizen of a language so instead of trying to name methods, you break down a description of code into paragraphs in english, then you could have a parser that attaches lambdas to those paragraphs.

you would also need the editor to know to display a separate implementation file for each paragraph.

similar to cucumber

Sounds like you are describing Intentional Programming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_programming

"What can CAP do for you? First let's agree….. worst name ever. Now that we're past that, here's our story, and an ask."

MS, you're competing with a product called "IFTTT". Don't think so lowly of yourself!

If This Then That is a pretty cool name. Zapier on the other hand...

I get where it comes form, and it makes sense, but it's long and will inevitably be shorterned to IFTTT which is just awkward.

An acronym/initialism is better if it can be pronounced like a word. CAP is one of them, and thus I feel it's better than IFTTT even though IFTTT's full name makes more sense and is 'good'.

In terms of searchability, "IFTTT" and "Zapier" beat "CAP" by a mile because the latter is a common word. So I can search for recipes with "IFTTT" or "Zapier" but in this case I have to type the full expansion "conditional action programmer."

Whether or not a name like IFTTT is awkward, and therefore bad in some sense, is subjective. Personally I happen to like the awkwardness.

What's "an ask"?

It might sound weird to you, but it's correct.

Noun

ask ‎(plural asks)

    1. An act or instance of asking.

    2. Something asked or asked for; a request.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ask

More information here: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4246/can-or-shoul...

Personally I never use it because it can sound far too close to "ass" especially through low-fidelity channels.

According to that link, it's been part of "Microsoft-speak" for over a decade.

It's definitely a noun, but the kind of noun that only annoying business people use.

Now try to find it in a real dictionary.

Here's oxford dictionaries on the word: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/ask

> [WITH ADJECTIVE] informal A demand or situation that requires a specified degree of effort or commitment:

> it is a big ask for him to go and play 90 minutes

> it was a tough ask, but they delivered

Or OED: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/11505?rskey=xAEeZD&result=1#ei...

> Westm. Papers 1 Nov. 107 Who has not suffered when he has played correctly second hand..from his partner assuming that there has been an ask for trumps?

> 2014 D. Chapman Ascendant lxxiii. 301 A plane? Full of people?.. That is an enormous ask.

When used liked that it's synonymous with request. If heard it often used as "that's a big ask". Some example usages[1] since you seem a bit skeptical.

[1] https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&q=%22big+ask%22&btnG...

> AP is an experimental project from Microsoft Technology and Research, available to you as and Android app on Google Play Store and the web.

And this is why I went from Windows Phone 8 to Android. The Microsoft experience on Android is arguably better than on their own OS.

And to think, the Android guys originally wanted to use C# as the native Android language, but were worried about being sued by MS for it.

Instead they went with Java and got sued by Oracle for it, whereas MS open sourced it all.

* Yes I know parts of .NET are still closed source/proprietary.

Microsoft even made the C# language specification ECMA and ISO standards. The ECMA process started shortly after the first commercial release. I'm pretty sure if they had just talked to the Microsoft guys, they would have realized everything would be fine.

You have to remember that Microsoft is a very different beast today than they were back in 2005.

Not really relevant to this particular conversation. C# was commercially released in July 2000. The ECMA standardization committee was founded in September of the same year. Writing began in January 2003, and the standard officially adopted in June 2006. This is all described in the standard:

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...

There's also a standard for CLI (Common Language Infrastructure), which is the underpinning of the .NET platform:

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...

I didn't say C# was released after this time, I said Microsoft is a different beast now. They've made a significant swing towards open source and embracing the OSS community. Back in 2005 they still very much thought they ruled the world and could get away with anything.

Your opinion on 2005 Microsoft is great and all, but I still don't see its application to this exact conversation. From 2006 and on, anyone could implement a C# compiler and runtime from the ECMA standard with absolutely no barriers from Microsoft. This was the result of a process that started in 2000, a few months after the official release of the language.

I think it is relevant. The Microsoft of that time (and it is debatable how much that changed) is not one company on which you'd rely on for a cooperation in such a project. There is no telling which tricks MS might have used to make money out of it – the same way Oracle's API copyright bullshit was a trick to make money. Don't forget that Microsoft uses patents to extort a share of many android phones sold, see http://uk.businessinsider.com/microsoft-android-patent-licen.... I thought that had stopped by now, but that article is from april…

> Microsoft uses patents

So does Google, so does Apple and so does Samsung. If you don't protect your rights they will be taken away. The mobile market is in a state of mutually assured destruction. The fault lies with our broken patent system and all the players in that market: not Microsoft alone.

It's also possible that Microsoft might have been less willing to open the language if it had become an integral pillar of the Android ecosystem.

True. We don't know that.

I think however that this may be one of those cases when perception is stronger than reality: perception of what Microsoft is and what Java is.

The ECMA standardization committee was founded three months after the commercial release of C#.

I'm referring to Microsoft's moves in the past year to release their compiler and other parts of the .NET toolchain (and Xamarin) as MIT-licensed open-source projects (moves the company wasn't forced to make). Even though the language itself has been an open standard for some time, the C# ecosystem was very different a few years ago than it is in 2016.

This is correct. The Microsoft apps on android are phenomenal. I think it speaks volumes about the android toolchain and development scope when a direct competitor can make better apps than for their own platform.

I am no expert on Android, but I have only heard negativity about the UI framework from developers.

And as for the toolchain, I can't speak for mobile development in particular. But generally speaking, VStudio smacks Eclipse silly.

I was going to comment on the fact that Microsoft has released a lot of their OWN tooling for Android. But I wanted to issue a quick correction to your comment: Android development hasn't been Eclipse based in years. Google went over towards encouraging IntelliJ, and Android Studio is based on it.

And still isn't able to deliver a sane experience for developing NDK based apps on Android, as what Microsoft produced in around one year.

Or an emulator as good as what Microsoft created for Android.

I really don't know what all those PhDs are doing in Mountain View, code review from offshored work?!

Microsoft is also delivering a developer experience for NDK users miles ahead of what Google PhDs and Interview Puzzle Solvers are capable to deliver.

"First let's agree….. worst name ever."

... At least they are consistent over time. Reminds me of this parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

I attempted to make a couple of tasks, so far it's very limited, but kudos to getting the framework going.

None of the examples actually save you any work/task completion. They line up more work/things to monitor/read/process and set you up for overload.

Looks sweet. Small spelling mistake

'available to you as and Android app on Google Play Store'

Should be

'available to you as an Android app on Google Play Store'

Yeah there's a couple of minor grammar mistakes too. I'm guessing this is very early stage stuff and doesn't have any marketing resources yet.

The very next sentence is "We need your help to continue to improve natural language understanding." Maybe a joke? Or maybe they wrote this on a cell phone?

This whole page looks very sloppy. In addition to the weird name, the grammar is iffy and sentences don't sound native. The fonts are also off.

It makes me wonder if this is actually a Microsoft project.

Is this a natural language interface of this service https://flow.microsoft.com ?

So will this result in yet more of my daily life being ferreted away in a data centre somewhere, with me having no control over its persistence?

I find it very amusing when people name other brands/apps etc on their homepage especially those where you don't have any business connection.

Case in point here is naming Pocket App on the homepage prominently. It gives on impression that Pocket is some big successful app but in reality has merely 22M users (active users must be lot lower).

I hope I am right to assume that MS has nothing to do with Pocket app.

Well I assume they integrate with pocket. Good enough reason to mention it I'd say.

Even if active is 5% (guess), that's still over a million people. It sounds big and successful, what metric are you using?

It's really a sign of the times that you can have 22 million customers and still not be viewed as big and successful.

Because of the post the other day about Bongard problems [1] I can't help but wonder if it is possible to use that author's algorithms to automatically detect the kinds of conditional patterns that this software wants to automate.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12064188

Anyone know what the "HTTP" integration is? If I could get this service to make an (authenticated?) web request I could make it hit a service on a box at home to turn some other stuff on.

Ability to turn my Xbox One on from a programmable button would be great, considering the Xbox Live team took Wake On Lan and turned it into something requiring a Microsoft-signed cert...

When I sign in with my outlook.com email address it asks for permission for the "Luis-Actions" app to read my email, among other permissions. It's probably Microsoft, but I wish they would have made the signup experience look a little more trustworthy.

They definitely need to make that clearer, but it does sound like the Language Understanding Intelligent Service [1] from Microsoft.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/language-...

Thanks! I figured it was some engineer named Luis.

Judging by the broken fonts in safari they neglected to test it on a non-Windows device

It's fine on android. And since the app is on android only, maybe they tested on android only.

On Android the font is big enough to read five or maybe ten meters away, from my 5.5" phone screen. Not sure this is really how it's intended.

It's big on my device too but not so big so as to be readable from 10 meters away. Or even 10 feet away.

> First let's agree….. worst name ever.

Why would they choose a name that they think is so bad?

Computer scientists are bad at naming. Let marketing handle it.

That's why naming is one of the hard problems in computer science.

The other three are memory management and off-by-one errors.

Marketing is even worse at naming things! You don't see programmers having 2 weeks of meetings to come up with a terrible, terrible name and still feeling good about themselves afterwards.

They couldn't think of a good one, or they don't want the hassle of changing it.

Reminds me of setting Gambits on my characters in Final Fantasy XII...

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