Julien Boyreau's blog

A libertarian and one of his new friend are in a bar, drinking a beer after work. The friend heard about his fellow being a dangerous anarchist so he decided to investigate a little bit more about that craziness.

The Friend: for you what is a state?

The Libertarian: a group to force the people in a country.

How is the state forcing the people?

The state threatens to put them in jail.

What is a state for?

It was actually to force people not to force each other.

You said “was”. That’s not true anymore?

No. Now, a state is to force people to do what some want: the biggest minority in democracy or the chief in dictatorship. To force them to give some of their money to the state, not to smoke in a bar, etc, etc.

Why do you think the purpose of a state has changed?

I think because people sometimes believe that forcing people to do something they want can be easier and less expensive that getting them to want it. And people quickly understood that the state is the biggest gun of all to force others.

So, in XIXth Century, people owning companies ask the state to force companies abroad to pay money. That prevented the abroad products, which were better, to be cheaper than the local ones. The richer won whereas the abroad companies and the local consumers lost.

When they saw that, it was easier for the new so called “socialists” to convince the less rich to trust them. They could tell the less rich they would make the state to force the richer to give them more money and fewer hours to work. 

OK, wait, if they did not, we would still work 12 hours a week for a misery, wouldn't we?

Actually, this is not right my friend. More money and / or less work and / or better work conditions is not contradictory with the growth of a company. Smart entrepreneurs, like Herb Keleher, know for a long time that happier loyal employees make happier customers that make happier shareholders. For example, why do you think Henry Ford raised wages in the 20s?

Everybody knows that! To make his employees customers!

Sorry but this is the myth, not the reality. Henry Ford raised the wages because he understood that better paid employees would be more loyal and it would thus be less expensive than recruiting and teaching new ones.

That’s the same issue in >?xml:namespace prefix =" ""st1" /?< China…

Wait… China, you won’t say China is a paradise, right?

No, obviously, I am just saying that in China they have been doing in 20 years what we did in one century, which is raising the daily available dollars for a huge part of them, maybe 300 or 400 million people. And you can see many regions out there where the “bargaining power” has been reversed: too many jobs, not enough people, so employers have to seduce people, not the other way around.

But there is no liberty in China?

Yes, and that’s a shame. But as you saw in Arab countries recently, education and globalization will lead to more freedom. What’s the biggest issue with China is not what they’re doing, but that they’re doing it at least 80 years after us, and at ten times the scale. So it is a big deal. Either we let customers in West profit from less exensive products and chinese producers raise their living or we turn back to closed systems where local low value producers will be happy but the Chinese and us as customers will be less wealthy.

Ok, but let’s back to us: honestly, the state is not “forcing” you…

How do you call one that would threaten you with guns if you don’t want to do what it tells you (which is what would happen if I refuse to pay taxes).

Right, if you’re not happy, you can leave the country?

But I was born here! Between you that want a state and me that don’t want one, why should you be more legitimate to stay?

…hmmm, because this is democracy?

Why democracy should be seen as a verifiable god given truth?  [The friend is mum]. By the way, why do you like the state?

Because it can help the poor.

Can you say the “less rich” instead of “the poor”? Honestly even the least rich today in our country are probably “richer” than Louis XIV was. And for me there are no way but arbitrary decisions to decide whether one is “rich” or “poor”: absolute adjectives can kill.

OK. So, because it can help the less rich.

Are you OK to agree that it’s doing it by racketing money from other people?

Yes. But it is necessary.

Necessary for what?

Because, it’s unfair to let them die!

Unfair to whom?

To me, first…

…so you feel better off knowing that the state is doing it? So you are asking the state to force people to do what you want?

…Ok, me, but everyone should feel the same?

Why? Wanting to help the less rich is a choice you make, partly to feel yourself better. You can think that people which don’t feel worse when thinking about the less rich are assholes, but why is that giving you the right to force them?

…but you don’t feel worse about the needy?

I feel worse. And I want them to get wealthier. But I don’t want to get what I want by forcing other people with a state.

…but without a state, they would die!

No. First, all the “universal” services from the state could be done much better and / or cheaper with time thanks to the right to compete. And, as in any country, we would have much higher “real solidarity”, where people choose to give money for nothing. The lower level of charity in a country is directly correlated to the higher level of state intervention.

That’s one of people’s biggest mistakes: wanting to provide a service to everyone by letting the state do it alone with no competition and paid by force. You know, if I can’t convince you to let me live with no state, I would rather let free groups to compete to provide the services and be forced to give money to the less rich for them to choose one of the services.

and what about free school and free French culture ?

It’s a bad example my friend. In France, it’s not a coincidence if we have the highest level of state spending and among the worst results, according to PISA. Second, there, it’s you that is richer and was born in a better off family that is stealing the less rich to pay for your higher education or culture they won’t get. As I said before, and Frédéric Bastiat before and better than me, everybody is trying to force anybody else with a state. Based on that, guess why I am sure you’re feeling a rise in “selfishness” or a crisis of the “vivre ensemble”.

You think it’s because of the state?

Yes. Gifting apart, the best way to get what you want from a person is to trade it for something he wants more. While trading, both are thinking they’re winning. As a state is to force, from the start, there is a forcer and a forced. State is feeding the fight between people.

Ah ah, you said it, “thinking” is the right word. Because we know each other that someone can lie in a trade and someone can regret!

You’re absolutely right…and that’s why some people or companies provide services to tell you whether or not you can trust someone else before a trade. And companies as ebay have even digitalized the process with feedback: you know you should not lie on a trade because people will know and may boycott you.

As you saw with Mediator recently, a state does not seem to be really better at providing trust J

Ok so, according to you, a way to prevent people from lying or forcing others is the risk for them to be boycotted?

Yes.

But “professional forcers” like Mafia would rise in your world?

I don’t think so. Especially because the state won’t be there to force people not to buy drugs. So many businesses done today in fear and violence would be pacified. Remember Prohibition. Patrick Ricard looks a bit like Al Capone but is less violent don’t you think?

And many groups will provide security services because it's obvious people want it.

Yes but don’t you believe that with time only one private security company will emerge as a monopoly and thus recreating a state?

You know, the very first reason for monopoly or oligopoly is the state. Because companies run by men, are like anybody else, wanting to profit from the state. Bigger corporations are most often pro state and can get rules to prevent competition from newcomers. So with no state, chances are smaller to be the only one to provide a service to anyone. And if eventually the only risk is to come back to where we are…

…but with what consequences! This would be a civil war!

Neither for me. First no place can work without having many people believing at least a bit in trade, state or not state (think about Iraq). Second, most of civil war is actually to…lead the state! So if people lose their faith in the state, one of the biggest causes of war is already gone.

…you say “faith”?

Yes, it’s really that faith I want to kill. I am logical. If some people want a state, I don’t want to force them not to have them. I want to convince them that the state is what prevents us to get wealthier and eventuallly happier. And, to start, I want that people not to force me to be forced by the state. Would you?

Then the dialog stopped and the two buddies left each other. That night, The Friend did not sleep as he could not stop thinking about what The Libertarian told him. What if he was right ?

in 1973, they predicted it, almost :-)

Would make a very good track in a spot for a Digital Companion. ''

All that you touch
All that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
All that you love
All that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
All that you give
All that you deal
All that you buy
Beg, borrow or steal
All you create
All you destroy
All that you do
All that you say
All that you eat
Everyone you meet
All that you slight
Everyone you fight
All that is now
All that is gone
All that's to come
And everything is going to Facebook
But Facebook is eclipsed by the ???''

As any geek fascinated by electronic gizmos, I followed the craziness around the beginning of April, aka iPad.
Almost everything has been said about it : here are the 3 main questions I got from it.

//

1) What's the market for a third computer between smartphone and desk/laptop ?

iPad is a marketing bet : that there is some room for a third computer that sits between the smartphone and the laptop.
As time and numbers will flow our RSS feeds, we'll know two things :
First, how many iPads and iPad ersatz will be sold. Second, and most importantly : how many iPads and iPad ersatz will be sold ADDITIONALLY to laptops and desktops.

2) Is this the beginning of the end for the Desktop UI ?

iPad is a new computing user interface : one in a full screen computer that gets rid of mouse, windows, files, folders, etc, etc...that is the same plain old user paradigm we've been stuck in since the rise of the first Mac 26 years ago.
I hope the logical next step for Apple will be to spread this new paradigm up to lap and desktop to make computers simple, easy and fun to use again.

3) Is this the beginning of the end for the "Web" ?

iPad is an ecosystem : a system that could destroy or replace the web ecosystem if continued to be successful.
iPhone OS is the only "browser"
Objective C is the language instead of Javascript / HTML and CSS
Apps are the equivalent of "web sites".
iAd is the equivalent of Google AdSense.
AppStore is the Google.
The main difference between the two is obviously about control : control from one company or control from a complex ecosystem of standards (W3C), foundations, companies...
I can't wait to see how Google will react to this danger: will they be as stupid as Microsoft and try to contradict themselves by pushing the "app" model ?
Or will they be smart and accelerate the development of the web ecosystem.
Chrome OS, Chrome Tablets and Chromebooks will so be quite interesting to follow !

Months ago, I wrote about what I was seeing as the most radical redistribution of roles in the computer industry since the emergence of personal computers at the beginning of the 80s.

The past months came up with so many announcements and news that it's hard not to be sunk.

However, here are the most interesting questions for me.

1) The Form Factor Battle: Netbooks are a mirage

There is not a week without one of the major companies in this sector trying to come up with a new moniker for this "bizarre" no man's land of 5 to 9'' screen computers.

First Intel reinvented the term Netbook to name them.
Then, Microsoft and nVidia started to try to deconsider this new term with the most simple "low cost small" laptops.
Recently, Qualcomm and Freescale started promoting the "Smartbook" name.

I am more on the same camp as Microsoft and nVidia on this: I don't think that Netbooks can survive as a standalone category for a long time.
As defended at many places on the Web, these computers are sieged between pocketable mobile phone computers that are much more portable and laptops that are much more versatile.
In the 2 to 3 years coming, pocketable will become more and more powerful and able to connect to massive screens and keyboards. In the same time, laptops will become less expensive with Moore's law.
So Netbooks will join the "nice attempt" graveyard of network computer, smart terminal and Co.
There are definitely no room for this cross over: they will die.

2) The Processor Battle: Intel vs. ARM

After exiting the mobile phone ARM-based industry years ago, Intel has come back with an AMD-promoted "x86 everywhere strategy", launching the Atom Brand towards sub-laptop territories, keeping power and compatibility but working on power savviness and integration.
I am quite sure that Intel's focus on Netbooks with the current generation of Atom is just a transitory step towards the main end game.
With the Medfield chipset, due for end of 2010, Intel will be able to target eventually mobile phone and will be in an face to face battle with the ARM's ecosystem, led by Qualcomm, TI and nVidia.
Sure, we'll see mobile phones with Medfield in 2011, probably from obscure Taiwanese companies without enough brand power to really make a difference.
The real deal for Intel would so to sign a deal either with one of the Top Tier mobile phone companies (Nokia, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Palm, RIM, HTC and Apple) or with one of the Top Tier desk/laptop companies, that will eventually go to pocketable computing (Dell, HP, Acer, Asus, Toshiba, Sony...).
I think that whatever the deals, Intel will need to find another angle of attack than "x86 compatibility".
Medfield will need to provide a real breakthrough in term of power vs. battery life to have a chance to win.
We'll see.

3) The OS Battle

In the 2 to 3 years coming, we may be on the verge of a radical change in OS dominants players.
Mobile phone OS suppliers (Palm WebOS, Symbian OS, Mac OS X, Android...) will move up to laptops with cleaner, more web oriented, touch oriented interfaces, able to rival Windows.
And once the Netbookmania has blown off, all the interesting work done (by Jolicloud, gOS Cloud, Intel's Moblin or my friend Olivier Seres' iFrame ) will migrate both to the simplified "laptop segment" and to the pocketable computing world.
I can't know yet who will win and who will loose, whether the 25 year old OS / Hardware unbundling will survive but this is one of the most interesting question of all.
Will the "slimmed down Linux exposing only a browser to the Cloud" work and mark the decline of computing power democratization we've seen for the next 50 years?
Will a dramatically new kind of kernel emerge as we're celebrating the 40th anniversary of Unix?

Finally many questions, few answers, so stay tuned!

9 months ago, in this article, I wrote about that many companies were trying to beat Google and detailed 3 questions towards this goal.

Today, I read about a new website coming in May, made by Stephen Wolfram (who made Mathematica), namely Wolfram Alpha.

Wolfram himself announced and introduced at this blog , and Nova Spivack, who made Twine, had chance to spend two hours with Wolfram being demoed the website, and then commented back about it.
Right after, Jon Stokes, who I cherish the damn insightful articles around chips at Arstechnica, expressed quite abruptely his doubts about the site.

Let's look at this site through my 3 questions:

1) Doing better
On this point, Wolfram Alpha (WA) seems to be on a right track. Following exactly the path I laid out (coincidence obviously ;) ), WA will be to give ANSWERS to requests, NOT just PAGES with the words told.
You will type questions in a typical Google-like search bar and WA will answer you.
You might so not cobble with the toundra of pages from Google to find the answer you're (implicitely) looking for when telling words to google.com.

2) Doing it different
On this point, WA seems to be exactly as Google, having to build a (guessed) big database and (guessed) big web sites to centralize all the logic to find answers and serve them to people.
Even worse, as explained by Spivack, the tool has to be bootstrapped and fueled by an army of persons entering tons of information by hand only for the sake of WA and maybe a ever growing total paycheck.

3) Monetizing different
On this point, no information is given.
Jon Stokes made his best point on this: even if the process is (sometimes) painful to find an answer with Google, we humans have quite been mastering the process and are able to go through it quite easily.
So, beyond the possible engeeniring masterpiece, what can WA be useful for?
As I explained, the biggest limit of Google is not for humans to find answer but that computers are completely unabled to use it in order to act for humans.

So what may be the most valuable part of WA is NOT THE HUMAN NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACE but the COMPUTER ABSTRACTED INTERFACE.
This could be opened and monetized to any other computer in order to get the answers and act upon them.
To take an example back from Spivack, it's pretty easy for an human to get the price of a share from Google with google.com but pretty impossible for a computer provided that a human read through the cumbersome functions written in XML to tell the computer to do so SPECIFICALLY for this question.
As far as I understand WA, it can contain a kind of a way for a computer to ask GENERALLY, making computers as empowered as we are with search/answer engines.

I've just come back from 3 weeks of holidays and a good discussion with my parents, especially on my philosophy and libertarians.
That's a recurrent process: when I talk with a person about that I am a libertarian, the person is amused at first.
Then when that person is a socialist, I am accused of being sold to big corporations, money or whatever.
When that person is more right wing, I am disdained to be just an idealist because my view can not work.

The biggest hurdle to this kind of discussion is that most often the person is orienting the talk by bombarding me with questions on how to solve this or that "problem" without forcing people with a state.
I previously used to be trapped in this by trying to draw how people without a state would make what some want for any case such as security, education, insurance, roads or whatever.
This always leaded to a kind of brainstorm ping pong on actually designing in details such an answer to a problem currently dealt by the state.

After reading and thinking about it, I now try to make my opponent shift to a deeper and more subtle understanding of being a libertarian.
For me, the main difficulty to compare libertarians and "democrats" (not the US party but the ones that love, trust and enforce democracy) is due to that they are not aiming at the same questions.

Democrats and democracy is a question of WHAT to do WHATEVER the means, FORCE INCLUDED: the way is to let each person in the place vote and do what the most want.
More precisely, in today representative democracy, persons are voting for WHO is going to tell what to do.
That is the rule of the strongest: the state is the strongest and it is making the laws.
Once this has been done, the government has a limited period to do what it wants with any means.

Libertarianism is a question of HOW to do WHATEVER the aims: the way is to let each person in the place do what he wants except forcing people, be it as an end (like a serial killer) or as a mean (like a state).

So as a libertarian, when I want the state to stop acting, this does not necessarily mean that I don't want the aim the state was trying to reach. It means that for me NOTHING should justify to force/racket people via taxes and rules, even for apparently "heart minded reason".

Introduction
2008 marks the 10th anniversary of one among the most recent successful companies, Google.

Looking at the WWW today, one can see that Google is everywhere, nearing Microsoft like monopoly, in many domains such as revenue growth, brand recognition, management practices and computers' network expertise.

Facing this kind of power, people tend to have one of two kind of reactions.
Being angry and trying to beat the player in front of states' court.
Being fascinating and trying to beat the player in front of people, offering a better solution to them.
I am definitely at my humble level in the second category.

In this text, I will expose some of my thoughts about the way a group may beat Google in front of customers.

1) Beating Google by doing better
Even if the company has been digging in many territories in recent days as Microsoft's been moving around Windows+Office, the main role of Google is to provide what we call "search".
Search for me is an unnecessary complex word for a more simple activity: what's Google actually doing is answering questions from people.
When you're typing words to tell to Google, you're not actually "searching" but morelike asking a question.
Except for a very small subset, the way Google's answering is very primitive.
It's just getting from its giant memory the pages in which the words are: the main value in this process is so not in "what" Google is getting but how it is ordering these pages.
The main limits of Google answers is so:
You always needs to read pages to get the "real" answer.
Sometimes, the fact that Google just see "words" and not "proper nouns", "common nouns", verb or adjectives is that it misses completely the point and you're wasting time either refining your question or reading more and more pages.
Google does not read between the content words and actually encourages people not to type them.
Google is working well to answer to a person, but not at all for a computer.

The last point is the most important: the limits of Google for answering to a person is a waste of time.
But the limits of it for answering to a computer is a dead end. Because of that, one of the main aim of a computer, that is to do something for a person is lost.
When you want for example to know in which cinemas you can see a film, you'll type the nouns, Google will answer probably the pages of cinemas companies first, you will read these pages and get it.
But if you want to tell a computer to tell you that when one of the cinema is in the city where you are, there is no chance it will ever be able to do it for you, as from the words to Google, it won't read the good information.
Thus there are many room today to beat Google by doing better and actually many companies trying to do so.
One of the main problem of them, beside technology is the second way of beating Google.

2) Beating Google by doing it different.
The real reason of monopoly is rarely the undefinite leadership of a company at the product level.
It's more often a particular core pre requisite that's almost impossible to defeat.
Intel and x86 has been there for 30 years because backward compatibility kills any chance to win with a better set of instructions.
Microsoft has been the endless leader of software because of a killer business model, selling to computer makers and so spreading any new Windows version with the PCs growth.
Google is a very solid leader not because of what they do, but because of what they have to make what they do, that is the most powerful, big and efficient mainframe ever made.
It always made me laugh to see that Google's always been pride of telling that you can know anything from Google. Actually, one of the stuff you can not know is about Google's computers. Simple but customized machines, numerous (500000+), dispatched all over the world, this system is fascinating.
However it promotes a model of computing that was popular in the 60's, the mainframe, centralizing all the information and computing resource under a single group.
The main reason why all the Powerset, Twine and al will fail is not because of their product.
It's because they're following the same architecture idea that's to make a super mainframe, and at this game, no one could out beat Google.
In the same way that Microsoft defeated IBM, to beat Google is to do it differently by pushing forward personal computing with P2P and not backward to mainframes.
To do that, there's even not a need to invent complex new protocols, but to come back to what the first vision of Tim Berners Lee for the WWW was: a person's computer that is able to GET and POST as a 'browser' but also to BE GOT and POSTED as a "server".
Promoting this approach, you may decentralize the Google system and gain more privacy, more scalability and more freedom to publish your information to anyone.
This will also put back personal computers in light to rediscover a role lost that's the third way to beat Google.

3) Beating Google by monetizing different
The main thing that's people are seeing from Google is software.
But as all the successful software makers, Google is not selling it to users.
Microsoft is selling to computers makers, Apple is selling the computers and Google is selling spacetime for ads.
As told before, a computer is aimed both for a person to do something AND to do something for a person.
The first is the main pushed by Google because in this one, there will be an interface for the person to do on which you can put ads.
Thus Google's business model is pushing a person to do more and more where a computer should also be a way for a person to do less and less (unpleasant) things.
Automatisation is thus really the way to attack Google business model not by trying to grab a share of it but by repurposing computers on tasks that limits its scale.

Conclusion
Many companies are today looking indepently at these 3 axis to compete with Google.
I think that it's in the combination of both 3 that a new leader would emerge.
This will come and after the US government, IBM, Microsoft and Google, will hightlight a new leader in the 5th generation of computing.

Try a little test : google the questions words in English.
On top of the list, you will find the usual suspects, what, who, why and how.
One will be quite less used than the others, whose.

However, the whose question has been the most important, controversial of all.
It has been the cause of so many wars, murders, conflicts and tears.
It's the essence of what makes humans different.

For anything, you can always ask : "whose is it?".
When this is a person, the answer has been agreed by blood and sanctuarized by a famous text : a person is self's.

But for anything but a person, the question remains: "whose is it?'.
Knowing this is the most essential, because we've been (quite) agreeing that the one whose it is can do what he wants with it and especially gives it to someone else.
To this question are only two answers: it is either a person's or persons'.

When it's a person's, it can change faster than when it's persons'.
Indeed, a person has just to agree with himself to do something to it.
When it's persons', they have to agree on what to do with it.

The most used rule for one that's persons' today is the one of the most.
What to do with it is what the most wants.
Most often, this is implemented by voting.
People are most often voting in two cases : for what to do with a state, where a vote is a person and for what to do with a company, where a vote is a share from the company.

The biggest difference between the two are :
For a company, only people that have shares can vote. These people BOUGHT these shares so took a risk to care about the company. They can SELL these shares when they don't care anymore.
For a state, only people that are citizens for this state can vote, so:
People living in the country where a state is can not vote.
People "investing" a lot in the state are as important as the others.
Citizens can not escape from the state to give away both obligations and rights got from the state.

Whatever the case, persons' is most often slower than a person.

So, while I am hating the system for states, I do think that anytime we can have one that is a person's, we should make it.

As I wrote before, we have been witnessing since the beginning of WWW a tacit fight between two philosophical camps in the computing microcosm:

In the left corner sit the promoters of "cloud" computing, the same that tried to sell the Network Is The Computer propaganda ten years ago.
As I explained before, "cloud" is just a more cloudy term to refer to mainframe computing, the popular architecture of the...sixties!!!
The few have computers and the many have screens and keyboards to tap in these huge and shared computing resources.
In this model, you are depending on the big guys for the right to do what you want with THEIR computers.
The main forces in this Empire are the biggest on WWW such as Google, that built the biggest mainframe ever with hundreds of thousands computers, and the makers of servers like Sun and Oracle.

In the right corner sit the more hidden promoters of "even more personal" computing, building on the shoulders of computing democratizers of the 70s, especially with Peer 2 Peer (P2P) computing.
As I explained before, "P2P" is just a fancy term to refer to the next step of personal computing, where more and more is done by a person's computer, sucking the control from the mainframes.
The main forces among these Jedis are the biggest makers of personal computers, from Nokia to Apple.

The latest interesting nascent trend from the Jedis is the idea of Pocket Web Servers.
This was started by Nokia with their Web Server for s60.
This has been worked by the iJetty project, targeting the Android stack from Google.
This SHOULD be the most important feature to add to Firefox to make it a real competitor to the Facebooks of the world.

A Web Server in the Pocket could make person to person communications much simpler by enabling a direct and standardized HTTP messages between handsets.

What's lacking for this?
Number 1, the collaboration of carriers to allow then optimize incoming requests to handsets on their network.
Number 2, a more spread will of persons to buy, thus own their name on WWW to be fully independent from service providers.

I can thus dream of the day where I may have Julienboyreau.com on my iPhone, letting who I want GET FROM it and POST TO it in real time, punching back all the Twitters and Facebooks of the world.

In the short term, 4 key companies may have to choose a camp :
Google may have to choose between Adwords (The Empire side) and Adsense (The Jedi side).
Intel may have to choose between Xeon (The Empire side) and Atom (The Jedi side).
Nokia may have to choose between Ovi (The Empire side) and Web Server, s60, NSeries (The Jedi side).
Microsoft may have to choose between Live (The Empire side) and Windows (The Jedi side).

Any person on Earth knows a language.

This may be English, French, Mandarin, Spanish or whatever, but any person knows at least one among these.

Any text between persons are in one of this language.

We've been writing and speaking with each other in these languages since a long time and they all became quite robust and powerful to tell what you want.

Then since the 50s, we've been writing and speaking not only to persons but to computers.

And we've kept on "making" new languages to talk with computers, from assemblers to Javascript, XHTML and CSS by C, C++, Lisp, Java, Smalltalk...

All of these languages for computers seem to me to share false starting points.

1) They're choosing an "orientation" be it "imperative", "declarative", "object", "functional", whereas languages for persons are multi orientation.
2) They have thus a specific grammar, focused on a single concept such as "object", "function", "query", "tag", "class", "resource", "triple"...completely different from the grammar for languages for persons, that ALL exhibits COMPLEMENTARY ideas such as "noun", "verb", "adjectives", "adpositions", "affirmation", "question"...
3) They let a person choose whatever words to reinvent "identifiers" from words picked up in a language for persons, either by concatening them ("PersonsWithASalary") or abbreviating ("iframe" or "char"...).

All of these draw a line between persons that took the time to learn one of this language and the others.
With time, the so called "programmers" group has been growing but in 2008, it's still a very small one compared to the rest.

One of the refreshing idea of the past 10 years has been XML : this is not a language per se, but symbols or syntax to talk to computers.

The problem of XML are however serious by design.
1) The "tag" and "attribute" in XML are not mapped to any natural language, so two persons can equivocally do what they want with them.
2) Even if it can be made clear what a tag and an attribute are for, two relationships are not enough to tell everything you can tell in a natural language.
3) You can make whatever tag or attribute you want, exposing people to the drama of "nominalization" ("creation"), "concatenation" ("RectangleWithRoundedCorners") and abbreviation ("char").

Point 2 is particularly serious.
For example, 'animal' => 'dog' => 'Malik', 'USA' => 'San Fransisco' => 'Malik', 'Clara' =>'dog' => 'Malik', or 'Malika' => 'Malik' are 4 different meanings, that is, Malik is a dog, Malik is at San Fransico, Malik is Clara's dog and Malik is from Malika.
In English, it's easy to tell ; in XML, it's just equivocal or impossible to do.

For me, what's needed is thus not a new "language" but symbols much better than XML, but one that is :
a) Richer than the 2 "tag" and "attribute" thing.
b) Nearer from the grammar of a language, with way to see a noun, verb, adjectives...
c) Univocal to tell what a symbol is for.
d) More restrictive on words, preventing a person to reinvent a noun, verb or adjective already in a language.

I have been working for 1 year on such symbols and making recently progresses to make them into a working example.
The coolest right now is that I can tell it in plain French, let it get what I told from French for this to be told in English and for this to be thought about from English.

In the next 3 to 4 months, I hope I will show it to more people than myself ;).

Stay in touch if you're interested to overcome "programming" languages and moving to more natural interfaces.