Pair-programming seems to be all the rage nowadays. But why waste all that employee-employee communication?

Your IDE will have a built-in audio recorder, that will be active whenever the cursor is in an edit window. The recorded audio will be bound to that particular section of code. (it will probably work better if it is bound to only *edited* code, but these are research items)

The audio files are checked and linked to the source code. Future developers now have megabytes of aural comments!

Also, vocal analysis could automatically determine where bugs are most likely to reside by measuring the stress levels of the developers.
-- RobotVoodooPower, Nov 05 2005

Hmm. I can see this working as long as the annotations are clearly spoken. Many developers I know have thick accents and, although in person it is generally easy to understand what they are saying, on, for example, the phone, it can be quite a bit more difficult to capture their precise meaning.
-- bristolz, Nov 05 2005


throw in video, too. I've never heard this suggested before, nice
-- theircompetitor, Nov 05 2005


“I don’t know why, but if you add 1 here it works fine.”
“OK, let’s go with that. It’s getting late.” +
-- Shz, Nov 06 2005


I'd never wan't my kids to hear an audio recording of my vocalizations when I am programming!

I take the digital too personally! I curse like a Crrellian most of the time, It's my opinion that most of my silicon friends fear me. They tend to behave beautifully when threatened.
-- Zimmy, Nov 06 2005


So, um, if you can't be assed to type comments, how are you capable of entering the code in the first place?
-- DrCurry, Nov 06 2005


This would be useful even to the solo programmer - muttering away to self - "..that fratzenjammer's all screwy, gotta fix it later, where's that call supposed to go? damn spaghetti code, forgot to define that array..." etc

The verbal part of the brain can porbably multitask with the typing part and improve your work-flow. I'd see this as useful for more informal notes, that the coder can then go back and annotate properly in text.

So + and I hope someone builds it.
-- BunsenHoneydew, Nov 08 2005


Excellent /* had to be or you wouldn't have read this comment */
-- phundug, Nov 09 2005



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