Labview is an excellent example of the limited scope of usefulness for graphical programming languages. The "front panel" layout features of Labview are great: for quickly whipping up a GUI, it's far easier to drag-and-drop interface widgets than to code up a layout by hand. The back-end "wiring diagram," however, is generally a royal pain to work with, as soon as you start trying anything remotely complex. There's a small scope of problems for which the ease of expressing parallel, event-driven logic in a 2-D layout is convenient; however, one quickly finds themselves burning huge amounts of time meddling with visually positioning elements in a comprehensible way for tasks that would be trivial in textual representations. There's a reason that people moved away from programming computers by manually re-wiring connections between simple hardware units. Much of Labview's visual programming interface represents a regression to the flexibility and ease of use of computers prior to 1950.
why aren't we at the stage of Star Trek where we could say, "computer, I want to mine some data, using name and location as keys and find me all the 40 year-olds with a last name of Smith".
Note that what you want has nothing to do with transcending "text" as an input medium, other than the trivial mapping of speech to text (which you succeeded at when typing your post). You want a programming environment that's a bit more flexible about interpreting "natural language" inputs --- however, the inputs are basically still "textual" in form, giving commands as a linear sequence of words. Besides the initial "voice-to-text" conversion, nothing in this situation uses "post-textual" representations. Now, if the computer was simultaneously reading your facial expressions and body posture as elements of the command --- additional dimensions difficult to realize in a plain-text representation --- then you'd have a "post-textual" interface. But, that's not how even the fictional computers in Star Trek worked; and, you probably wouldn't want them to.
I have seen these things you speak of. I have also noticed that they have an extremely low information density, especially compared to the effort required to produce communications. Compare the number of person-hours required to make a movie versus writing a book. "TV" and "youtube" are not generally the first places I turn to when I want detailed information about a subject.
Why are we still writing text-based books, and communicating in word-based languages? Surely, we should have some modern, advanced form of interpretive dance that would make all such things obsolete. Wait, that's a terrible idea! Text turns out to be a precise, expressive mode of communication, based on deep human-brain linguistic and logical capabilities. While "a picture is worth a thousand words" for certain applications, clear expression of logical concepts (versus vague "artistic" expression of ambiguous ideas) is still best done in words/text.
Okay, mod parent troll. I had my fun. Yes, I suspect astroturfing no, I don't know it's true.
Yes, I cannot use the betas or the mobile site with my phone.
No, I loathe JS.
Yes, it appears dice is going to take a massive hit because no, they won't back down, and no, they don't understand the concepts in the book "the tipping point".
No, I suspect nothing can replace it, but it appears slashdot is dead. No, there's really nothing else I want to see discussed here, which means soon I'll get tired of this and leave.
Bye.
Never trust a computer you can't repair yourself.
