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Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

You could easily build an AST with gestures and speech rather than tapping buttons, and I think in 10-20 years time that's how we'll make software.

I doubt it. Perhaps we'll be making ASTs by writing (i.e. drawing symbols with styli or pens), but I don't think we'll be doing it via gestures and speech. There's a reason that we don't teach math via interpretive dance.

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There's also a reason people in the same room don't communicate by tapping buttons with letters on them.

They don't?

Generally, no they don't.

We do that a lot; for technical stuff it is often many times more efficient than talking.

Edit: And easier to search, remember, read again and the less nice variant of that; 'you never said that to me' 'I did: ' copy/paste.

Obviously people occasionally do talk in person via pressing buttons. That doesn't mean it's generally preferred.

Recorded speech is also searchable so not sure that's relevant.

> Recorded speech is also searchable so not sure that's relevant.

It is ; recorded speech is not very searchable, especially if you are talking in a group in a conference where people can be from different countries with different dialects (which is the normal situation for our group talks). Also it is not convenient and sometimes not possible to record every (conference) meeting (too much noise etc). With text it's automatically recorded and perfectly searchable...

Also some of my colleagues are not good at English listening but are very good technically; if I type what I mean they understand while if I/we tell them, everything has to be translated and/or repeated many times.

I think the tech is not there yet to say it's not relevant.

Totally agreed the tech is not there yet. I just also believe at the current rate machine learning is going it the issues will soon be much less relevant.

I hope so but that has been a long standing promise. For me no amount of voice to text beats typing. I do not know why but things like Dragon basically give me gibberish. And that is with natural language. With natural language, code and math it is just vomit. I have no clue how they will solve that soon and then mix.it with translation as well. Hope there is though.

I can't say I've found any scenarios where talking to someone is many times less efficient than typing them a message. There are certainly times where it's helpful to supplement conversation with code, but that's a different story.

Regarding being easier to search and read it again, it seems like there are potential technical solutions to that problem, but I would agree that we're not there yet.

Go ask teens with a smartphone at a restaurant but I've been doing the same myself sometimes. 1-1 or group chats.

A more specialized scenario: I was copy/pasting stuff to a colleague in the same room yesterday.

They don't care about other people in the same room trying to concentrate on what they're doing?

Like 'Zecc said, maybe they don't care about the third parties present. Or maybe they want everyone to be a part of the conversation, which is often fine. Or maybe they talk about emotional matters.

But text is a pretty fine form of communication and I find myself using it very often at work (and at home I often talk this way to people not in the same room, but in the same flat). It's fast, it's convenient, it's less disrupting, and the only reason to avoid it are some silly preconceptions that digital communiction is somehow "worse" than spoken words.

Also, you never passed papers to your friends while in school? That's pre-smartphone equivalent of IM.

I do that all the time at work. Coworker (who's sitting next to me) has headphones on? Message him on hip chat.

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