
Conditional Action Programmer - pavanlimo
https://www.conditionalactionprogrammer.com
======
rtpg
I'm always a little miffed when I see natural language being the input,
because now in order to use the tech I need to also play the "guess the verb"
games.

This is especially bad in Wolfram Alpha.... I can clearly see that all parts
of a query are supported but I have to get the NLP part to parse my sentences
right. Though there is Mathematica I guess....

Not that I dislike all natural language stuff (far from it) but I'd love to
have access to an AST builder too

~~~
jlebrech
I'd like a language with "natural language" as a first class citizen of a
language so instead of trying to name methods, you break down a description of
code into paragraphs in english, then you could have a parser that attaches
lambdas to those paragraphs.

you would also need the editor to know to display a separate implementation
file for each paragraph.

~~~
mej10
Sounds like you are describing Intentional Programming.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_programming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_programming)

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NamTaf
"What can CAP do for you? First let's agree….. worst name ever. Now that we're
past that, here's our story, and an ask."

MS, you're competing with a product called "IFTTT". Don't think so lowly of
yourself!

~~~
nutheracc
What's "an ask"?

~~~
slazaro
It might sound weird to you, but it's correct.

Noun

ask ‎(plural asks)

    
    
        1. An act or instance of asking.
    
        2. Something asked or asked for; a request.
    

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ask](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ask)

~~~
userbinator
More information here: [http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4246/can-
or-shoul...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4246/can-or-should-
ask-ever-be-used-as-a-noun)

Personally I never use it because it can sound far too close to "ass"
especially through low-fidelity channels.

~~~
morgante
According to that link, it's been part of "Microsoft-speak" for over a decade.

It's definitely a noun, but the kind of noun that only annoying business
people use.

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jdmichal
> AP is an experimental project from Microsoft Technology and Research,
> available to you as and Android app on Google Play Store and the web.

And this is why I went from Windows Phone 8 to Android. The Microsoft
experience on Android is arguably better than on their own OS.

~~~
rjbwork
And to think, the Android guys originally wanted to use C# as the native
Android language, but were worried about being sued by MS for it.

Instead they went with Java and got sued by Oracle for it, whereas MS open
sourced it all.

* Yes I know parts of .NET are still closed source/proprietary.

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
It's also possible that Microsoft might have been less willing to open the
language if it had become an integral pillar of the Android ecosystem.

~~~
jdmichal
The ECMA standardization committee was founded three months after the
commercial release of C#.

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
I'm referring to Microsoft's moves in the past year to release their compiler
and other parts of the .NET toolchain (and Xamarin) as MIT-licensed open-
source projects (moves the company wasn't forced to make). Even though the
language itself has been an open standard for some time, the C# ecosystem was
very different a few years ago than it is in 2016.

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chris_va
"First let's agree….. worst name ever."

... At least they are consistent over time. Reminds me of this parody:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k)

I attempted to make a couple of tasks, so far it's very limited, but kudos to
getting the framework going.

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cairo_x
None of the examples actually save you any work/task completion. They line up
more work/things to monitor/read/process and set you up for overload.

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togasystems
Looks sweet. Small spelling mistake

'available to you as and Android app on Google Play Store'

Should be

'available to you as _an_ Android app on Google Play Store'

~~~
drewm1980
The very next sentence is "We need your help to continue to improve natural
language understanding." Maybe a joke? Or maybe they wrote this on a cell
phone?

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morgante
This whole page looks very sloppy. In addition to the weird name, the grammar
is iffy and sentences don't sound native. The fonts are also off.

It makes me wonder if this is actually a Microsoft project.

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tuan
Is this a natural language interface of this service
[https://flow.microsoft.com](https://flow.microsoft.com) ?

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nul_byte
So will this result in yet more of my daily life being ferreted away in a data
centre somewhere, with me having no control over its persistence?

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tn13
I find it very amusing when people name other brands/apps etc on their
homepage especially those where you don't have any business connection.

Case in point here is naming Pocket App on the homepage prominently. It gives
on impression that Pocket is some big successful app but in reality has merely
22M users (active users must be lot lower).

I hope I am right to assume that MS has nothing to do with Pocket app.

~~~
drewm1980
It's really a sign of the times that you can have 22 million customers and
still not be viewed as big and successful.

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bloaf
Because of the post the other day about Bongard problems [1] I can't help but
wonder if it is possible to use that author's algorithms to automatically
detect the kinds of conditional patterns that this software wants to automate.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12064188](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12064188)

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voltagex_
Anyone know what the "HTTP" integration is? If I could get this service to
make an (authenticated?) web request I could make it hit a service on a box at
home to turn some other stuff on.

Ability to turn my Xbox One on from a programmable button would be great,
considering the Xbox Live team took Wake On Lan and turned it into something
requiring a Microsoft-signed cert...

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svec
When I sign in with my outlook.com email address it asks for permission for
the "Luis-Actions" app to read my email, among other permissions. It's
probably Microsoft, but I wish they would have made the signup experience look
a little more trustworthy.

~~~
feldraco
They definitely need to make that clearer, but it does sound like the Language
Understanding Intelligent Service [1] from Microsoft.

[1] [https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-
us/language-...](https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/language-
understanding-intelligent-service-luis)

~~~
svec
Thanks! I figured it was some engineer named Luis.

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NegativeLatency
Judging by the broken fonts in safari they neglected to test it on a non-
Windows device

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dingo_bat
It's fine on android. And since the app is on android only, maybe they tested
on android only.

~~~
lucb1e
On Android the font is big enough to read five or maybe ten meters away, from
my 5.5" phone screen. Not sure this is really how it's intended.

~~~
dingo_bat
It's big on my device too but not so big so as to be readable from 10 meters
away. Or even 10 feet away.

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3dprinted
> First let's agree….. worst name ever.

Why would they choose a name that they think is so bad?

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CephalopodMD
Computer scientists are bad at naming. Let marketing handle it.

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bbcbasic
That's why naming is one of the hard problems in computer science.

~~~
taneq
The other three are memory management and off-by-one errors.

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bitwize
Reminds me of setting Gambits on my characters in Final Fantasy XII...

