Programming without coding

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Computers have penetrated into almost every industry; shortly programming will become a mandatory skill in most industries. The new kind of jobs will require people to analyse and plot data, manipulate text, query database, and control internet of things or robots.

Currently, programmers build a layer on top of these systems; a user interface for non-programmers to interact. Since industries advance quickly, rapid changes must be made to these interfaces because they can only do things for which they are programmed. Making these changes is time-consuming and costly.

A better way is, people should be able to interact with the computer directly. Writing code is one way. But writing statements that have to be precise can be tedious, even for expert programmers. For non-programmers, this is not an easy task. Hence, we need an alternative.

Group of researchers from Stanford University may have come up with a way to solve this problem.

Voxelurn allows you to program in the natural language. You can type in ‘add green monster’ to add a monster of color green. You can see the list of commands supported here. But, that is not the best part yet. You can make your definitions. Initially, you will need to know the core language to make things. After that, you can write your definitions. As the computer learns your definition the whole process of programming will become more natural.

I would have written a small tutorial here for your understanding. Unfortunately, their website is having issues. You can go through the above video for a demonstration.

Researchers recruited 70 users from Amazon Mechanical Turk. They were asked to make structures on voxel. The definitions created by these users were shared so that one could build from others definitions.

1.) User A creates a face structure and defines it as “Add a face.”

2.) User B uses the command “Add Face” and makes a hat on top of it. Say “Add a face with a hat.”

3.) User C can use the “Add a face with a hat” definition and probably add body, hands, legs, etc.

The idea is to evolve the language with a community of users over time. As the system learned researchers noticed that users tend use naturalised language more than 85% of the time.

This research is a good step towards a future without code. You can look into the technical details here. Here’s a link to their open source repo.

Follow Hackernoon and me (Febin John James) for more stories. I am also writing a book to raise awareness on the Blue Whale Challenge, which has claimed lives of many teenagers in several countries. It is intended to help parents understand the threat of the dark web and to take actions to ensure safety of their children. The book Fight The Blue Whale is available for pre-order on Amazon. The title will be released on 25th of this month.

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