"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?
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.