For example, in the future, could programmers and mathematicians manipulate symbols in the air, like Tony Stark does in Iron Man?
Well, doing it in the air probably isn’t going to happen until we have augmented reality systems that go far beyond Google Goggles, but I’ve been hearing speculation about more visually oriented symbol-based programming since at least 1995 or thereabouts: basically, compilable versions of the block diagrams programmers already use for design work. It seems to be one of those technologies that’s always ten years off, though.
It’s already common for hardware engineers to directly manipulate chip layout through a visual interface, though for all but the simplest circuits there’s also a syntactic element in the form of Verilog or VHDL code.
Well, doing it in the air probably isn’t going to happen until we have augmented reality systems that go far beyond Google Goggles, but I’ve been hearing speculation about more visually oriented symbol-based programming since at least 1995 or thereabouts: basically, compilable versions of the block diagrams programmers already use for design work. It seems to be one of those technologies that’s always ten years off, though.
It’s already common for hardware engineers to directly manipulate chip layout through a visual interface, though for all but the simplest circuits there’s also a syntactic element in the form of Verilog or VHDL code.