Many of us coders, programmers and developers struggle with repetitive stress injuries, carpal tunnel, etc.
I’ve been curious about introducing voice control into my workflow in order to save myself some stress.
This has led me to my current question: Would it be possible or practical to implement a programming language (or superset of an existing language) which was primarily phonetic, and hence well suited to programming by voice?
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A phonetic programming language is certainly possible, SKI combinators give you a Turing complete language, and I don’t think there can be any doubt that ‘S’, ‘K’ and ‘I’ are phonetic. With a restricted language like this there is even room to replace open and close brackets with something phonetic, maybe ‘C’ and ‘D’. Of course actually using Turing tar pit languages is not something most people want to do.
The more interesting point is, is it practical to develop this way, with a ‘real’ phonetic language, as far as I know this is somewhat unknown.
A simple solution to solve puntuation and complex structure issues would be to phonetize a stack-based language such as Postscript.
The vocal editor could implement multiple modes, like vi: insert mode for saying the program and command mode for navigating and functions such as copy-paste, text search…
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I don’t think there is a strong need for a programming language specialized for this.
However there is a need for alternative input methods for current programming languages.
Here’s a presentation by Tavis Rudd about writing code using voice recognition.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI
He wrote python which might be easier to write this way than c for instance, so your mileage may vary depending on your preferred programming language.
Would it be possible or practical to implement a programming language (..) which was primarily phonetic
Possible: probably.
Practical: probably not, your vocal chords would suffer even faster under the stress then you would get carpal tunnel.
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