Are There Better Ways to Enhance the Person-to-Digital Computer Interface?
Are There Better Ways to Enhance the Person-to-Digital Computer Interface?
If you and I were smart enough to answer this question, then we are wasting our time at our present occupation . Today the concept of the mouse has been implemented in just about every imaginable fashion ” we have roller mice, laser mice, roller ball mice, and even baseball hats fitted with acceleration sensors that cause the cursor to move up, down, left, or right based on the movements of the wearer of the baseball cap. The rationale for the baseball cap is that the user does not have to lift his hands from the keyboard to move the cursor.
Don t count out the touch screen advocates. There are truck stops in Nevada where a truck driver can touch a large map of the state of Nevada and the area he touches is expanded greatly in scale until the screen gets down to a 2.5-mile picture of the road conditions under one s thumb. A red road is ice; a blue road is nice. Or there are suitcases that the maintenance people on a nuclear submarine carry around inside the boat. By continuing to point on the screen of the video terminal inside the suitcase the scale expands to show more and more detail of the hardware embedded in the hull. Finally the screen presents a tiny portion of the boat, and when the mechanic points to a particular subassembly that needs repair he is informed if that part is located onboard. If not onboard, it is ordered for pickup the next time the submarine surfaces. Before the suitcase came along, the mechanics carried 1,800 pounds of user s and maintenance manuals somewhere in a forgotten corner of the submarine. The suitcase and all its data modules probably weigh a hundred pounds . This means that the seamen aboard the boat can now store 1,700 pounds of DVDs to help pass time under the seas.
I challenge you to discover the next generation of input devices to digital computers.
In Conclusion
What does all of this computer activity mean to you, the programmer of the 21st century? These are the most important personal inferences if you choose to enter the programming world:
-
With the advent of true structured programming and true object-oriented programming, combined with the Microsoft IDE as posed in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, the average programmer will be relieved of the responsibility of generating 90 to 95 percent of the source code that he would have generated 30 years ago. The focus of computer programming efforts at software corporations will turn to combining existing packets of code into usable end products that make life easy for the user of the software (the customer). Whatever task a digital computer program is asked to do, there will probably be a prebuild that meets the need.
-
These prebuilds will be presented to you, the programmer, within the confines of the IDE, and it will be necessary that you learn how to use them. The size of computer programs will not be an important factor in their design in the future. You will spend less and less time in the actual coding of software to meet the buyer s requirements and more and more time investigating the availability of prebuilt code that will do the job for you (with no necessary long- term testing of deliverable products).
-
The number of computer programmers who will be gainfully employed in the preparation of commercial software will decrease somewhat in the next 20 years because the productivity of individual programmers is expanding so rapidly . Those who migrate to the large corporations (like Microsoft, Borland, Oracle, Computer Associates, Corel, etc.) will find the greatest opportunities to expand their knowledge of the industry. Smaller software companies are constantly being bought out by larger companies.
-
Many of the programs that were written in the 1980s to meet specific requirements of software buyers will now be met by wiring together the capabilities of more basic computational and data processing machines, like databases for example. Database experts will revolutionize the financial and banking industries, if they have not already done so.
-
The federal government continues to be the biggest buyer of new software for its agencies, particularly the Department of Defense. Only the federal government is willing to invest large sums of money to reinvent large software programs every decade ” commercial business will not spend these moneys for perceived gains in productivity in the workplace. If the federal government goes out of the software procurement business, American programmers will suffer greatly.
In the next chapter we discuss the main platform in which you will work ” the Microsoft IDE.