These systems don't solve the problems you're solving?
Not yet, but give it a couple years.
You will join the taxi drivers, and so will I.
Not yet, but give it a couple years.
You will join the taxi drivers, and so will I.
-IBM Press Release 1954 regarding the 701 translator
Predicting the problem will be solved in a few short years is the easy part. Execution to realize those predictions is much harder.
[1] https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_translator....
Other than that all you need is a camera, a computer and a dictionary.
"put a Russian book at one end and an English book at the other, ”predicted Dr. Dostert."
It completely loses its original meaning not to mention the latter half of the quote.
I think the constraint of "if every language was a one-to-one variant" is too constricting to be of use in the real world. The reason why this is hard is because that rule rarely holds true. Language is more about communicating concepts than just words. Translating one-to-one concepts is much harder because you need to understand context.
Being intimately familiar with a couple languages, I find it a bit frustrating how often single words can't be translated perfectly because of small differences in meaning. Google Translate also often gets confused with false friends.
At this point, language isn't a barrier. I read and write Russian without knowing how to read or write Russian. I regularly talk to my Russian friends in Russian thanks to Google Translate.
It may have taken a bit longer than the 1954 prediction said, but it did happen.
67 years have passed and we still need translation for many applications.
That’s not an indictment of the technology; only of the extreme optimism.
But in 1954 there were no web pages and reading articles or papers published in foreign languages was extremely rare. Nowadays, these are all translated instantaneously for free by modern web browsers with reasonable fidelity. And odds are these make up the overwhelming majority of the foreign language material a modern person consumes.
I imagine the pairs of languages plays a part, and of course the prose.
Regardless; there will always be ambiguities, and many sometimes-important-subtleties are bound to be lost in translation. Even when a professional human does it.
(Also your prediction being half a dozen decades late isn't particularly useful.)
To corroborate your point about Google translate, that’s exactly what writers used to create gobbledygook language for the malfunctioning robot in The Good Place. They literally used the tool to translate his dialogue from one language to the next so it would be semi-incomprehensible gibberish
For one I still call a Taxi when I need one. Happy to pay a bit of extra to get a professional driver. I don't want to bash on people using other services or people providing those, but it's not for me.
Similarly my clients call me and my colleagues because they have a problem that needs solving, we solve it partly with programming because that is how we can solve it exactly, reliably and freely. We don't typically use low-code tools because they can trap us and they don't scale with our ability and understanding, and the productivity they promise is true for narrow uses. Our clients don't use them because it will and has taken them too much time to learn and use them with mediocre to (really) bad results, they want the problem to be taken care of and are willing to make a trade.
The second point is that I simply refuse to stop adapting and learning. I'm happily adopting technology into my repertoire when the tradeoff is worth it. Analyzing and understanding those tradeoffs is part of the job. Expanding knowledge is part of the job. And this was always true for anyone who works in software related fields, our community always has had to adapt, adopt and evolve, balancing pragmatism and curiosity.
Then they came for the taxi drivers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a taxi driver.
Then they came for the frontend programmers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a frontend programmer.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
They tried, but there was not any taxi on sight
Part of me is pessimistic about AI programming tools, part of me thinks they’ll only enhance the agency of existing programmers.
Either way taxi driving is probably easier to automate and only requires modifications to Tesla’s self driving tech.
I suspect that these tools (if they do anything at all, anyway) will just make it harder to learn programming as a newcomer - just as all the advances in programming that have come about in my lifetime have. IDE's are great, until they do something you didn't expect, and then you have to understand what it is they're automating in order to figure out how to get them to do what it is you really want. Try explaining a Java classpath or dependency problem to somebody who's never opened a command-line terminal before. Docker is great - until it expects to find something that you happen to not have installed. What will probably happen here is that you and I will be fine, because we'll be able to effortlessly wield these new tools as they're just doing quickly what we used to do slowly, but new students to programming will have an even steeper hill to climb than we did.