Ask HN: Audio-visual programming for tablets?
I recently got a tablet and wanted to use it for programming. There seem to be two options: get a hardware keyboard, which means using your tablet will be just as comfortable as using a laptop (read: not particularly), or get one of the better IDEs that have their own specialized software keyboards. I'm not very keen on using a software emulation of a paradigm developed for typewriter keyboards attached to line printers.
So this is what I was thinking: speech recognition is hard because a) the diversity of the words that must be trained and recognized and b) the ambiguity of human language itself. Programming languages have almost none of these issues.
Combine this with a visual programming language and you can say "define class shape", tap the class box that has appeared, say "define variable color, is equal to null", tap the class box again, say "define method set color, arguments new color", then tap the method box, tap the `color` instance variable from above, say "is equal to" and tap the `new color` box that was created when you said it's a function argument.
What do you think? Could this possibly work for creating simple games on the move, automating some tasks, etc.?