Oddly enough, there's something a little bit BS-like (EDIT: 1960s-ish) about PG's definition of "powerful". (I know Paul, you hate having to explain everything little thing you say, but bear with me here)
The word "powerful" is such a generic it doesn't work here. I guess the simplest way to explain is to look at what I think Paul is saying: as our languages evolve, it takes less "stuff" to tell the computer what we want it to do.
The problem here is that the amount of "stuff" required is as much a user interface problem as it is a syntactical one. Surely neural interfaces can render most coding obsolete eventually. Perhaps well inside our 100-year timeframe. So what, then, is meant by powerful? Is it our conversation with the computer we are trying to maximize, or our conversations with each other? In other words, am I trying to get to the quickest magic to get from my thoughts to code, or am I trying to get to the quickest magic from my team to a solution that we all understand? In the second scenario, the "power" of a programming language is more about how well it can help the team discover, implement, and maintain solutions that have value. Not about the directness of my personal thought-to-code.
I think this second definition of "powerful" holds up better in the real world. My opinion only, though. I don't have a bunch of essays or a cool venture fund, so take it for what it's worth. I hate to be Mr. Definition Guy, but it's tough to have conversations like this without understanding what the heck we are talking about.
"Surely neural interfaces can render most coding obsolete eventually."
I am skeptical of that. I think that a good programming language can be a great help for making ideas precise and exploring their ramifications. We may have some vague notion of what seems a great idea, but when we go to express it in a precise way find out that there are significant obstacles that were not at first evident. So, the read-eval-print-loop of a good "exploratory" language might still be very useful, even in a world with neural-computer interfaces.
Wouldn't a good neural interface create some abstraction of a read-eval-print loop that would seem natural and not part of some other language?
I mean, don't we do the same thing when we have conversations with other humans? Let's say we're going out and the other person wants some things from the store. Surely we are both capable of discussing what's needed from the store without having to formalize it so much, right?
So I take it that perhaps you feel that machines will always need a more formal conversation than humans? I find that a little difficult to believe, what with machine translation, OCR, voice commands and such. (None of which are perfect, but all of which are getting closer to being very useful)
I guess I would be interested in what part of a neural interface would not be able to provide the stimulus a programmer is already receiving from his programming IDE? And if the neural interface can make it the same stimulus, surely there would be room for improvement, no?
The word "powerful" is such a generic it doesn't work here. I guess the simplest way to explain is to look at what I think Paul is saying: as our languages evolve, it takes less "stuff" to tell the computer what we want it to do.
The problem here is that the amount of "stuff" required is as much a user interface problem as it is a syntactical one. Surely neural interfaces can render most coding obsolete eventually. Perhaps well inside our 100-year timeframe. So what, then, is meant by powerful? Is it our conversation with the computer we are trying to maximize, or our conversations with each other? In other words, am I trying to get to the quickest magic to get from my thoughts to code, or am I trying to get to the quickest magic from my team to a solution that we all understand? In the second scenario, the "power" of a programming language is more about how well it can help the team discover, implement, and maintain solutions that have value. Not about the directness of my personal thought-to-code.
I think this second definition of "powerful" holds up better in the real world. My opinion only, though. I don't have a bunch of essays or a cool venture fund, so take it for what it's worth. I hate to be Mr. Definition Guy, but it's tough to have conversations like this without understanding what the heck we are talking about.