compiler fantasies
After seeing my boss’ hand in bandage due to using the computer too much, I’m wondering whether it would be possible to develop a VoiceIDE, an IDE based entirely on voice commands. The programming language itself would probably have to be adjusted to be easy to pronounce. E.g. try to say a regular expression out loud! Kaya might actually be well on the right track, with largely text-based commands instead of too many () and []. But it should be possible to improve on that.
It would involve:
- Building a good GUI;
- Developing a new language incl compiler and debugger;
- Using speech to text and text to speech modules;
- Building a nice programming interface that automates wherever possible.
Using voice commands requires a lot of differences with regular IDEs, like commands to quickly move around your code, interfaces to select variable names, etc.
If developing a new language, it would be nice to have a language that is elegant and safe, like Kaya, but that creates code close to C speed. So it should still be fairly close to computer language and allow for a lot of flexibility, like pointers. All added safety comes at a cost of less flexibility, though, so this requires a lot of thinking.
Another idea I had was to perhaps rewrite the Kaya compiler in C. Try to make it run much faster than the current compiler and in the process write out the documentation, since that is still practically absent. But I should first have a really close second look at Kaya whether it is really worth investing any time in.
Add comment October 20th, 2006