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> What we need now is a simple program that takes normal human text and outputs a program. Input "write me a program that adds the numbers 1 to 100" and you would get a program that did that.

The problem is normal human text is ambiguous and flawed. Case in point:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=write+me+a+program+that...

Correct, but probably not quite what you intended.

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Yeah, but when the latency from description input to program output is in seconds, then you could iterate on the description quite fast. It would be like programming, except you don't need to know any algorithms and all the plumbing takes care of itself.

"Write me a web-site that allows users to login using Facebook and sign up for my mailing list."

It's a program that I think can be written in an autonomous fashion, but I just wanted to point out that as soon as you start coding non-trivial programs, testing and debugging you're non-specific language is going to be hell. So bad that I think you are going to have to write thousands of sentences, and eventually decide you want a more specific language than English when you can't determine which of the thousands of words or grammatical elements you and the computer disagree on.

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