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Comment by mkautzm | Hacker News Reader

I cannot, even in a world of total science fiction, think of anything short of straight up mental entry that could totally replace a keyboard.

Even in a world where dictation is perfect, do you really want to be saying 'Colon, Dee' to enter in :D. Not to mention the implications on coding, or other places where the language we use is simply the middle man.

So, as Aaronem said, 'no'. Maybe one day if/when a device can just read your mind and immediately put what you are thinking on the screen, but until then, the keyboard isn't going anywhere.

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> do you really want to be saying 'Colon, Dee' to enter in :D

"Open mouth smiley"

> Not to mention the implications on coding

Could be the renaissance of english-alike programming languages like HyperTalk.

   on mouseDown
     answer file "Please select a text file to open."
     if it is empty then exit mouseDown
     put it into filePath
     if there is a file filePath then
       open file filePath
       read from file filePath until return
       put it into card field "some field"
       close file filePath
       set the textStyle of character 1 to 10 of card field "some field" to bold
     end if
   end mouseDown

Intuntil you try to make a game and has to input physics coding or it, or you are a user of matlab...

> "Open mouth smiley"

But this is ambiguous. That could be ':D' or '=D'.

As for the coding example, I cannot imagine that ending well. I mean, it's full of little oddities that don't exist in spoken language. Even look at "filePath". You can't say filePath because while in our heads, we see it like that, the spoken is 'file path'. Paths themselves are a mess to deal with since words like 'space' and 'backslash' and other 'reserved words' couldn't be used in the actual name of the path because they would have to be used in other places.

Spoken language is just way too context sensitive to work at that level. Written language is absolute, at least to a machine.

Agree. I know I already talk to myself in english when I'm reading code. Something like "Okay we have a data structure named users consisting of an array of objects. Each object has..."

The programming language is just a translation of ideas from my english language thinking to/from the computer. I don't see why it couldn't be more english like. To type it all out in that fashion would be very tedious, and even speaking it is more tedious than simply users = [{},{}...]

But with sufficient abstraction these things would become less and less verbose.

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