Slashdot Mirror
Software Lets Programmers Code Hands-free
Yetihehe writes "New Scientist is reporting about a new speech recognition tool that promises to let programmers write clean code without ever having to lay a finger on their keyboard. 'The tool, called VoiceCode, has been developed to help programmers with repetitive strain injury (RSI). This is a common affliction for people who spend a lot of time using a keyboard or mouse and causes pain in muscles, tendons and nerves in a sufferer's arms and back. Some estimates suggest 22% of all US computer programmers, or 100,000 people, suffer from the condition.'"
If a programer has to say if-then as many times as he types, no doubt his mouth is going to get RSI.
Many people thought obesity is caused by junk food, but in reality is caused by having too much junk food.
So the best way to prevent RSI is to work out a reasonable and healthy work schedule that prevents such excessive usage.
Please stop entering code 2,2,7,6,6,4
*Computer, Close Browser*
Nothing to see here, please move along.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Pound include less than -- unf -- io -- unf -- stream greater than character return new line feed -- unf -- pound include -- AW SHIT ALL OVER THE KEYBOA--NO MOM, I DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING!
"'The tool, called VoiceCode, has been developed to help programmers with repetitive strain injury (RSI). This is a common affliction for people who spend a lot of time using a keyboard or mouse and causes pain in muscles, tendons and nerves in a sufferer's arms and back."
And now vocal cords. Now imagine this sytem in say a team environment. Everyone talking at once.
What would make all the difference is being able to program the actual voice recognition software, in a macro type sense. Perhaps being able to voice vi commands? "colon-oh" instead of "insert line"
New hot off the press: VIM - Voice Improved!
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Most programmers can't write clean code with a keyboard.
My workplace is constantly bombarded by the sound of several Indian guys arguing about mundane stuff such as coding conventions and color schemes. I really don't need my computer thinking that's me talking.
"It typically takes the better part of a day to get all the pieces installed and working properly," he says. "For someone who has trouble typing, that may seem insurmountable."
I would like it if you did not use the term "has trouble typing," sir--and make such faulty assumptions about us. I prefer "typographically-challenged," thank you very much.
void calculate_offsets(Node *foo) {
int dummy;
double buffer[ Hey, Smith, what, are; you doing there;
damn(it)->im.busy_coding.here;
}
E443 2:12 syntax error after [
...finally being able to safely program whilst driving! Woot!
Would finally mean that people learn the difference between brackets, braces, and parenthesis\
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
"For x equals two two to"
FOR X = 2 to 2
"Erase word, erase word, erase word"
FOR X =
"Twentytwo to"
FOR X = 222
"Erase word"
FOR X =
"Open parenthesis eleven times two close parenthesis"
FOR X = ((((((((((())
"Son of a.."
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Seems like this is the answer for this guy.
Next thing you know, software development will be hazardous to your tongue and mouth in general.
:)
Seriously though, I noticed that when I type, I express my thoughts in a more clear fashion than when I talk. I think this is because I am not distracted by the sound of my own voice. I can think faster than I type but not necessarily faster than I talk
You can't handle the truth.
What kind of code would come out if the developer was stoned? Never mind, we already have Windows.
It's a very dark ride.
Yeah this will work. I can't wait to see people trying to pronounce some of the stdlib functions, not to mention some of the other goofy things that people generally use.
Picture it:
Programmer: int df = strcmp( lhs, rhs );
Computer: int diff = stircomp(lis, ris);
Programmer: Noooooooooooooo!
Computer: You're more luser, than 1337. I'm going to bluescreen now.
Linux : Hotrod
Reduce or eliminate RSI?
See our recent discussion how RSI is user-inflicted.
First Voice Post!
Damn! This technology does wurk.
http://saveie6.com/
Programmers in India don't get RSI.
Nuff said....
.... no hands!
I don't know about anyone else but my code never really gets translated in my head to English or any spoken form and doing so would seriously effect my coding. When I'm in groove, I'm thinking machine not human.
I've actually played around with this idea. What you really need is voice, combined with keyboard and mouse and you really could improve speed of coding. With the lookahead that most IDE editors support these days, it's pretty easy to do symbol lookups which could be adapted to voice.
The real trick is with symbol names; variable names, method names, class names, etc. The problem is that these are not necessarily words that will be easily adapted to spoken voice, which is made significantly worse with hungarian notation.
But if you dump hungarian notation and use descriptive variable, method and class names (which is probably a good programming practice anyway), then you can probably get by pretty well.
Will it be able to account for squeaks, mumbling, stutters, and Indian accents?
Those are great for programming. My boss has one and I'm planning to bring one over to work.
And the programmers of this software didnt get RSI why? Its easy to avoid RSI. It seems like voice recognition software to help sufferers of RSI get back to work is tantamount to putting an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff instead of a big sign at the top that says, "DONT WALK OFF THE CLIFF"
"Old man yells at systemd"
Nah on a serious note, I am a programming student... And this just sounds like a waste of time. IF your wrists start to hurt, stop, rotate, rest, then resume programming. Gel rests. There are other things, less expensive than all new software, that you can use to prevent RSI. Besides, with me, I wouldn't use it anyway, I have an injured wrist from my job in a bakery anyway, and i find if i wear a wrist support when I'm having a bad day with it, i don't deal with any pain while typing because it limits the movement of my wrist.
Imagine you not only have a really good speech recognition system with a good language parser but an actual AI to talk to when you are writing your code. How well would this work? You can find out by getting a human friend to play Oz by 'hiding behind a curtain' and typing what you say in natural language. Try it. Then decide if a system like this will ever be useful.
Does it work for Perl? If so, we can say it is done.
Rethinking email
What does XCCR do? I entered the numbers and got 3 keys, but it doesn't work anymore.
Google's cache shows a completely different site
Am I the only code monkey that advocates writing out at least most of your code with pen{pencil/marker} and paper? It doesn't seem to cause as many repetative injuries, but perhaps I am incorrect in that assumption.
:)
On a personal note: I've made my boss howl with laughter by informing him that I was on version 7 of the code related to one small project, but before I touched the keyboard I'd written out most of the changes on paper. It was even better when I showed him the scrap paper I'd been snagging from the recycling bins to do my design work on. I thought coffee was going to shoot out his nose; never had trouble getting a pay raise or vacation time from him since
When I mentored a couple of young co-op programmers they, at first, thought this practice was very crazy, but after they saw the benefits of having to thinking your code through while writing it out they started to follow this practice though not as drastically as I do.
Try saying $|++; $@?@^W--:!s/$#_/$_/g while <>; for 3000 lines !
My throat will never recover!
So are they able to program their code with their application now?
Some of you may know that RMS (Richard Stallman, GNU hero) suffers from bad RSI. He has to hire people to type the code he dictates. This could be really useful for him. Maybe he'll be a bit less angry when he can code again.
"40,000 monkeys at keybo...err...MICROPHONES, led by a chair-throwing gorilla."
From TFA: rapidly translating their utterances into awkward programming syntax. Sweet! This will be just like my typed code!
pound exclamation-point forwad-slash bin forward-slash bash line-feed
colon left-parenthesis right-parenthesis left-brace space colon pipe colon ampersand space right-brace semi-colon colon
save tilde forward-slash script
chmod space a plus x line-feed
s u root line-feed
[speaks password]
m v script forward-slash bin forward-slash ls line-feed
(wow was that a waste of my time to type all that...)
There is a much better way to avoid RSI... Develop strong wrists. Seriously, after my first child was born, and I had to carry him around everywhere, I never had RSI again. Of course, once your wrists are screwed you need to rest them first before starting a work-out program.
What the world really need is a TV/DVD remote with speech recognition. Tissue in one hand and remote on the other just doesn't work.
Check out this English -> Python interface.
Computer, go to red alert. Wonder if we'll be seeing issues like this?
The above is most likely humour. Slashdot foot icon goes here.
I can't get speech recognition accurate enough that I can type out a damn letter without having to proof read it for sometimes comically embarassing mistakes, and now they reckon you can code with it? I'd hate to be the test code-monkey they tried this on out on. What's the bet they manage to sell it to some PHB though :-)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
At least I won't work all day and then accidentally DELETE! a FILE!
now we can all sound like trekkin' holideckkers...
***Computer! Run program "Picard1"***
A lot of people become programmers because they don't want to talk to idiots all day long (as in Sales or HR). Why would I want to talk to my computer, the biggest idiot of them all?
http://www.coderoshi.com/
What I don't understand is, why it took so long to develop this product. I would have thought that recognising spoken code would be much easier than recognising spoken natural language, just as parsing code is easier than parsing natural language. Code has none of the ambiguity and context-sensitive meaning of natural language, and so (with a bit of thought put into making the spoken commands unique sounding) it should be potentially much easier for a computer to turn into text.
Then again, if code really is poetry, maybe it isn't so easy for computers...
At least not in cubicle farms...
(coming from a non-English speaking background my self)
I can just image all the Indians (no offence here, could have also been Italians, etc) in may office trying to talk all at once
I'm not sure I'd trust a system like this for a language like C, C++ or Java with its icky grammar full of parentheses, braces, commas and other types of pointless noise. But it might be nice with languages from the ML family such as Haskell where the main bit of syntactic 'glue' is simply white space. Haskell code is pretty compact too, in the sense that there's less to type per 'concept' that you want to express, so it's ideal for coding when your input rate is less than optimal.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
a handjob tool for people who spend much time browsing prOn. Pervs are people too
This may also have implications for the future direction of the development of programming languages. If this takes off, the programming languages of choice may shift towards those that are 'easy to speak'. Then again, the languges themselves may remain the same (in text), and it may simply be the voice-to-code tools that change the syntax.
I would have been a salesman
VoiceCode will discriminate non-english speackers...due to accent..etc.Unless it can understand and process all languages. Can you imagine an Idian coder using it and the resulting code? Outsourcing Killer! But with all seriousness BrainCode will be much better...I code in my sleep. Infact I have re-writen google search engine five times.
Finally!
Something to drown out the IM glissandos.
Will it confuse "then" with "than" and viceversa like many /.ers here claiming to be programmers? So that it writes "if-than" conditions? =)
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
Obviously spelling code out punctuation with clumsy punctuation words won't do. This program cuts out some of the punctuation, but the real solution is to assign proper (single-syllable) abbreviations, in patterns which allow you to combine them into words wherever you'd want to. If you don't worry about sounding like English you can have a single syllable for every punctuation mark and editor command, plus syllables for "start transcribing string literal"-type commands. It would be easy to learn and you'd eventually learn to speak it like a fluent second language. Why say "is less than" like in the article when you could say "les"? You'd also have syllables for common editor commands, things like "transcribe string literal", and so on. Integrate it with autocomplete and it's as good as (maybe better than) typing.
Will it recoginize why I say when I say, "DELETE ALL FILES?"
Fight Spammers!
I've had ongoing problems for the past few years. As a contractor, with a family and mortgage, I've just had to push through. I've not had it specifically diagnosed or treated - my mother had it as an office worker and there isn't much you can do to treat it. every know and then it wakes me up in the middle of the night with pain as bad as my dodgy prostate.
to the naysayers:
until Neuromancer-style jacks are available this will do nicely thanks
If you want to reduce Repetitive Stress Disorder, spend less time typing and write less code. I saw a demo of CodeRush (a plug-in for Visual Studio) where challengers were asked to complete a reletively simple task, racing against one of the presenters who was writing the same code, but using CodeRush. Oh, and the presenter was only allowed to type using a pair of chopsticks. The presenter always won, and probably doesn't have Repetitive Strees Disorder, either.
> But if you dump hungarian notation [...]
:)
If you dump drinking a quart of gin before work every morning, the quality of your code may improve. If you dump stabbing yourself in the legs with a sharp knife, the pain in your lower extremeties may decrease.
Unfortunately, I cannot stop using hungarian notation, cannot stop the breakfast gin, and cannot stop stabbing myself...because I was never stupid enough to start!
I think the high percentage of RSI is caused by yanking off, not by the keyboard. Does this device allow voice-controlled yanking off?
Dave: Warp-speed, Hal
Hal: Sorry, I cannot do that, Dave, you will injure yourself.
Dave: Just do it Hal, I want it now now now!
Hal: Sorry Dave, but that is against my programming. How about a song instead, Dave?
Dave: Okay, you win, Hal, do the song.
Hal: Daisy Daisy, Bicycle Built for Two...
Dave: Oh yeah Hal, you're the one, you go girl. Sing it faster now...
Table-ized A.I.
Suicide by regex? preg_match("/^([123456789][[:digit:]]{3})-(0[1-9]| 1[012])-(0[1-9]|[12][[:digit:]]|3[01]) (0[0-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-3]):([0-5][0-9]):([0-5][0-9])$/ ", $date, $part)
How about programming using the mind? We'll start finding code strewn intermittently with obscenities and porn. I remember an experiment at MIT in which they moved the mouse pointer using thoughts. At least its better than having a commotion in the office. Why not just design a better keyboard?
Perl has had that feature since the beginning.
You need: Mic, speech recognition software, bottle (or 2) of vodka and a hammer.
1) Hook up the mic and speech recognition software.
2) Test that they work.
3) Drink bottle (or two) of vodka
4) Smash your face in with the hammer. Try to break most of your teeth and your jawbone.
5) Put on the mic and open up pico, teh best *nuX editor.
6) Speak and voila: Valid Perl comes out.
He's an amputee, he lost both arms near the elbow in an accident when he was little. He types with a pen, and sometimes his elbows on the modifier keys. He writes macros for everything to reduce the number of keystrokes, including things like getting the column list for a table and building an insert statement. Using his voice would only slow him down.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I wonder if the developers have ever spoken for 8 hours straight?
We thought of combining keyboard-mouse coding with voice recognition software as an aid, but in the end, it would cause too much extra time, which you could spend more effectively. I mean if you keep 15 minute breaks in the hour, switch keyboards and mice from time to time, use ergonomic chairs and well adjusted desk, height, keyboard/mouse location, etc. then you can _very_ much lighten, eliminate or postpone (whatever) any RSI-related injury. And by typing you can get your work done more faster - well, this also depends on many things, but usually speaking - and time saving is very important for many of us.
:P
Anyway, coding with voice recognition would only be most useful if there would be a programming environment where you would program like this: "Computer, start new program. Write airport flight control program, and bring me a beer. Wake up signal when finished. Start."
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
With this new technology, programming in Perl is going to be mistaken for a new dialect of Swahili.
) +=$f=!fork;map{$P=$P[$f^ord[ P.]/&&
@P=split//,".URRUU\c8R";@d=split//,"\nrekcah xinU / lreP rehtona tsuJ";sub p{
@p{"r$p","u$p"}=(P,P);pipe"r$p","u$p";++$p;($q*=2
($p{$_})&6];$p{$_}=/ ^$P/ix?$P:close$_}keys%p}p;p;p;p;p;map{$p{$_}=~/^
close$_}%p;wait until$?;map{/^r/&&}%p;$_=$d[$q];sleep rand(2)if/\S/;print
Anyone? (from here http://perl.plover.com/obfuscated/)
If someone could spend all their time writing a speech recognition tool to aid in coding, why not go the next step and actually start creating Code that spews out Code. This is theoretically possible, the only barrier being the presentation of the problem from the human and the interpretation of the problem by the machine. Heck, that's why we write (source) "code" and we use the fastest (and perhaps the most convenient) possible input devices. Is there statistical analysis to prove that a programmer spends more of his time typing source code rather than terminal commands, compile commands, test cases or documents? Papers on Software Engineering seem to point that coding isn't the most intensive part of any software project. Did I get this wrong?
I do not disagree that speech recognition is good for the average business user who usually is accustomed to typing by hunting rather than touch typing (which causes RSI.) The easier way instead of one getting sore throat over coding would be to have ergonomically friendly keyboards; Check out Kinesis (Macromedia Flash Warning) or try and use light projection keyboards that can project keyboards on almost any desktop surface. No one seems to have commented on handwritten code, whether they produce the same Stress injuries upon writing heavy volumes of text.
Further, I remember that MIT media labs did have a paper on reduced cognitive activity while speech was being used as an interface with people (spoken and listened to.) I am unable to get the link to this paper which opined that it was better not to use speech recognition where critical thought (driving, heavy machinery, precision engineering et al) is required. There are other problems when programmers start talking, everyone has to start wearing ear-muffs (so they wouldn't hear anyone talking, directional microphones to avoid picking up another conversation or noise.) I wonder why they haven't though of all of that before letting voice recognition help in coding. This doesn't seem a remotely convincing method of source code input.
No Greater Friend, No Greater Enemy! (Lucius Cornelius Sulla)
i think it's a great idea. in fact, i thought of voice recognition for programming many times. ;)). :)
but with present programming languages it might be a bit difficult (see perl
but if they invent a programing language only containing words and no hardly-speakable words like "circumflex" or so, i think i'd love to use it
aenogym (aka anonymous coward^^)
This just in:
Having had such a positive response with their VoiceCode products the designers are moving onto a second widespread cause of RSI... a voice powered vibrator.
The designers are toying with the slogan "The more you scream the more you cr..."
Users... the only thing keeping 1st level support from being the bottom feeders.
Voice-based programming plugin for Eclipse.
http://www.cis.uab.edu/info/Eclipse/SpeechClipse/
while open bracket true close bracket open brace new line print eff inverted commas is voice recognition really that new question mark surely it's just going to make things take ages to say full stop and think about how monotonous your voice would become after using it for a while exclamation mark backslash N inverted commas semicolon new line close brace
The only thing I hate more than talking to people is talking to computers.
What?!? Another COBOL???
Those programs i dream of in the night that i mutter, mite become killer apps.
Another one of those invented afflictions that drug companies have pushed to the fore to make a bit more cash... RSI is in the same league as 'Restless Leg Syndrome' - come to think of it, why don't I get RSI in my restless leg?
I've actually had RSI and used previous voice systems. It's good for email to your family but tough when you have to make up "a += zlch(bz)" as you go. That stuff isn't in it's dictionary.
And vocal cord soreness actually is a known problem of these systems.
My advice: Stay out of the disability system as long as you can. They can spend money and not help you. They can send you to plenty of doctors who are useless. They will buy you an ergonomic chair that has little relevance. They will not protect you against employer discrimination. They will motivate employers to never hire you again until you move to another state. They will bill the last employer you worked for so that they blacklist you, even if most of the damage occurred under a different employer.
In the US, if you're out of work for a year or two the employers cannot be sure you weren't in jail. Jail records go behind a curtain after a certain number of years to protect against discrimination against ex-cons. So if you're not an ex-con the employer has to assume you may be one.
I18N == Intergalacticization
Isn't is obvious which programming language is designed to be spoken?
Once we all have RSI, the next step is to turn us all into business-rule-encoding drones...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Programming languages were never meant to be spoken. Consequently, it is very difficult to dictate code.
For example, to dictate the following C++ code: The programmer might have to say something like this:
"if open-paren Charlie uniform romeo romeo cap romeo echo Charlie cap-November uniform mike less-than max begin-capitalize begin-no-space off set end-capitalize end-no-space close-paren new-line open-brace new-line new-line close-brace up-arrow tab-key"
Voice Code makes code dictation simpler by allowing the user to speak in a more natural and easy to utter syntax. For example, the above code could be dictate simply by saying something like this:
"if current record number is less than max offset do the following"
This is both shorter to utter and less cognitively demanding.
All them hands free programmers..
Good point.
Now all you need to do if you suffer from RSI is to get your employer to agree to you writing everything in Haskell.
Cant I have a system which works like Aladdin's Djinn like i say "I need a Portal" and it comes up with such system in minutes.
Isn't this a solution to a problem that goes in the wrong direction? As far as I can tell regularly typing code it disapearing any time soon anyway. They should put the research into an open source object-relational case tool and be done with typing code. Any code that requires typing it extra special and involves more thinking than typing. The more effective my functions get, the more I have to ponder them.
In ten years from now we'll be building code out of virtual 3D blocks with sensory input for and from arms, hands and eyes.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I don't buy the 22%. I know a lot of programmers. A LOT. I've been programming and typing my ass off since 1970. Maybe one person I've ever met had RSI. So based on my experience, at least, it's a solution looking for a problem, especially if they're counting on that wacky statistic.
Not that it wouldn't benefit someone with really crippling RSI. I'm all for it. Just, don't tell me 1 out of every 5 programmers is going to switch to voice coding. Nonsense.
I'm not sure I'd trust a system like this for a language like C, C++ or Java with its icky grammar full of parentheses, braces, commas and other types of pointless noise.
I imagine part of the point is to not have to worry about that noise:
"if-block. Condition flag equals true. body. " etc. etc.
sudo ergo sum
Anyone have any experience with different headsets for voice recognition?
Apparently they hugely affect VR performance in noisy environments.
"When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a frisbee"
I think the proper syntax is "I wish I had a Portal"
I don't really want my neighbor's code showing up on my terminal.
More can be found here, here and here.
Other than that, it would be pretty hard to work next to people talking to themselves, as some are unable to speak in a hushed voice.
Furthermore, having programmers talk to computers would definitely knock the profession's geek-factor up by a notch or two; BAM!
It's all well and good until you realize it's inserting "`fsck`;" every time you say the F word. :)
...with the participants in obfuscated code contests. Or how about using this to program in lisp?
..........."
"Open-paren, open-paren, open-paren, open-paren, open-paren, open-paren, x, close-paren, close-paren, close-paren, close-paren, close-paren, close-paren
I meta-moderate because I care.
In my day, programmers would 'code' one-handed. Only we didn't call it 'coding', we called it 'masturbating to porn'.
The difficulty is that there isn't the simplicity and more importantly the predictability as there is in normal voice recognition.
Voice recognition is all fun and dandy- it can look at where you are in a sentence, and narrow down it's choice. It has a list of words to choose from that it can narrow down based on soundex and other phoentetic algorithms. It will 'guess' at the closest match on a noun that sounds like 'fox'... maybe 'box'... Nah- the box wouldn't jump over the lazy dog, so the fox it is.
Programming can be anything though. Sure the simple structures are no worries (for variable i equals zero...) but what about variable naming? What about asterisk-asterisk-gppbbvar1? What about abridged words like cnt_results? There is no dictionary to compuse this one. Nothing to compare to. What it hears is what it'll type... and that's not good... as it's probably often wrong.
You can't beat the speed of typing. I've tried voice-recognition on many instances and in each of them even _after training_ the system, I can still type much faster than I can speak... and both of those are slower than I can think!
Voice recongition will never replace good computing habits. That's all there is too it.
PS: This this is programmed using only voices? What effect does that have on bugs?
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
they need to make the Voice code hands free and brains free!!
"Write a program in c# to find a factorial of a number"
Software to let people write code hands-free? Most of the code I have to maintain looks like it's already been written hands-free. The common technique seems to be for the programmer to code by slapping the keyboard with his dick.
I have a friend who uses Dragon Dictate and a set of Emacs macros to write code. He's been doing this for over 10 years, and it works well for him. He suffered a terrible stroke while he was a grad student at MIT back in the late 1980's. Then, he spent 5+ years regaining all of his abilities (walking, talking, etc). Typing is still difficult for him due to limited sensation in his hands, so he cooked up his Dragon/Emacs system. Now, he's a CS PhD student once again. Quite a story!
-- Hot Wasabi over & out --
Wally: Voice command, huh? That's neat. Gee, It be a shame if you accidently DELETE! FILE! before you saved.
Demented But Determined.
coming to the development group near you ...
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Here is a doc that describes how I cured my "RSI":
http://www.rsi.deas.harvard.edu/handout.doc
or Google view as HTML
Sounds crazy, but actually makes sense once you read and understand it.
Google for "sarno tms" for more info...
"I need you to program me the perfect virus."
"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."
The power of Christ compiles you.
A Random Blog
The following link describes a method of enabling your own vocabulary creation.
c /msg/117d0698cecc0f46
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.amiga.mis
A few years ago I used to joke with a friend on mine that programming PERL though voice recognition software would have to sound like one of those African click languages to handle all the special characters.
I perfected a handless input device years ago. Its a foot long dowl rod ducked taped to the head. I got the idea by watching a dippy bird - http://science.howstuffworks.com/question608.htm
Pain denies typing to many of us. Voice recognition has been both a godsend and a curse. Without it, I would have no job. Thanks to it, I am constantly reminded of what I can no longer do. Because it is so rudimentary and slow, I have become a far better programmer, spending far more time thinking before "talking" a single line of code, and I can't wait to go back to school and get out of programming altogether because I will never be as fast, productive, or happy as I was when I could type. And God help me should my voice go out.
-Ben
"Ok, 3D game engine. Model and load my town. Make it multiplayer. Compile it for every operating system that ever existed. Begin sales. Wake me up when we've made 10 million bucks."
if i had to do this ""if (currRecNum maxOffSet)" a VoiceCode user only needs to say: "if current record number is less than max offset then". " i think i would live threw the pain...(doctors will perscribe pain killers :p ) come on a coder can type that if statment in less than 2 seconds, it would take them about 4 to say it outloud in that form....
(yes i know i suck at spelling fell free to correct my grammar and/or spellin i dont care, im still not going to change
The "type" of a variable does NOT tell you enough about the meaning of a variable to be useful enough to counter the fact that it DOES tell you enough about a variable that you may THINK you know the meaning of that variable. It's a case of "just enough information to be dangerous".
Why is everyone so interested in handsfree computer use for programming. You'd think there would be other reasons why you might want to, say, browse the web without having to type. In case you need to, uh, knit or something while you're browsing. Yeah, that's it.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
"Nazis".
My wife uses MS speech recognition to make notes and journal entries while driving. It requires a bit of cleaning up later but since the text is for her use only it's not a big deal. She "trained" it in the car while we were on a long trip and it's quite accurate for common words and phrases.
It figures. That's why I use nano.