Copilot Can't Beat a 2013 'TouchDevelop' Code Generation Demo for Windows Phone 18
What happens when you ask Copilot to "write a program that can be run on an iPhone 16 to select 15 random photos from the phone, tint them to random colors, and display the photos on the phone"?
That's what TouchDevelop did for the long-discontinued Windows Phone in a 2013 Microsoft Research 'SmartSynth' natural language code generation demo. ("Write scripts by tapping on the screen.")
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp reports on what happens when, 14 years later, you pose the same question to Copilot: "You'll get lots of code and caveats from Copilot, but nothing that you can execute as is. (Compare that to the functioning 10 lines of code TouchDevelop program). It's a good reminder that just because GenAI can generate code, it doesn't necessarily mean it will generate the least amount of code, the most understandable or appropriate code for the requestor, or code that runs unchanged and produces the desired results.
theodp also reminds us that TouchDevelop "was (like BASIC) abandoned by Microsoft..." Interestingly, a Microsoft Research video from CS Education Week 2011 shows enthusiastic Washington high school students participating in an hour-long TouchDevelop coding lesson and demonstrating the apps they created that tapped into music, photos, the Internet, and yes, even their phone's functionality. This shows how lacking iPhone and Android still are today as far as easy programmability-for-the-masses goes. (When asked, Copilot replied that Apple's Shortcuts app wasn't up to the task).
That's what TouchDevelop did for the long-discontinued Windows Phone in a 2013 Microsoft Research 'SmartSynth' natural language code generation demo. ("Write scripts by tapping on the screen.")
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp reports on what happens when, 14 years later, you pose the same question to Copilot: "You'll get lots of code and caveats from Copilot, but nothing that you can execute as is. (Compare that to the functioning 10 lines of code TouchDevelop program). It's a good reminder that just because GenAI can generate code, it doesn't necessarily mean it will generate the least amount of code, the most understandable or appropriate code for the requestor, or code that runs unchanged and produces the desired results.
theodp also reminds us that TouchDevelop "was (like BASIC) abandoned by Microsoft..." Interestingly, a Microsoft Research video from CS Education Week 2011 shows enthusiastic Washington high school students participating in an hour-long TouchDevelop coding lesson and demonstrating the apps they created that tapped into music, photos, the Internet, and yes, even their phone's functionality. This shows how lacking iPhone and Android still are today as far as easy programmability-for-the-masses goes. (When asked, Copilot replied that Apple's Shortcuts app wasn't up to the task).
1 + 1 = egg (Score:2)
1 + 1 = egg
This is entirely a non-sequitur
Copilot? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
They should also ask CoPilot about "squirting", which I believe Microsoft thought was all the rage back about then.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Crap story. (Score:2)
I posed the question he should have posed, since he wanted to compare it to whatever this weird TouchDevelop script is: "write a program that can be run on an iPhone 16 to select 15 random photos from the phone, tint them to random colors, and display the photos on the phone in TouchDevelop script" to gemma-3-27b-fp16.
Since he didn't specify what language he wanted it in, he got it in Swift. Similarly, mine produce Swift as well when it wasn't asked to use a specific language.
Swift
Re: Crap story. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
You didn't say if you got something that you could cut and paste and it would work directly, Swift or otherwise.
Because I couldn't.
For the TouchDevelop script, there's no emulator available anymore (website is gone)- I did actually try that.
But eyeballing it, it "looks fine to me". I have *zero* familiarity with that particular... scripting language, though.
As for the Swift, it just doesn't apply.
You'd need to make an xcode project at minimum within the gui. After that, you could compile from command line, but that wasn't really in the scope of the request.
For whatever it's worth- it did give me a set of instru
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
it should give you the gui + code + steps
It did... I thought I said that. I don't feel like launching xcode, creating a project, going to apple and re-freshing my developer account, then building. If you have an active one, I'd be happy to post the code.
But it will make up lines that don't work in the name of looking good and that's the problem.
Don't really see that. More so, see out of date or invented library details.
If it were generating garbage that looked good and didn't run, things like Cursor and JetBrains AI assistant and other paid IDE codegens wouldn't exist, because nobody is going to pay that on top of their IDE license.
I ha
Why would the two things be comparable? (Score:2)
A device-specific script generator for an old Windows Phone, vs. a brand new iPhone app? This comparison makes no sense.
That 2013 demo would have had very strict constraints on what you could ask it to do, and the wording you had to use to get it to do it. That's what AI shines at...being able to "understand" prompts that are poorly worded or leave things out.
Re: Why would the two things be comparable? (Score:3)
Feels a bit like AppleScript, a language that makes some things easy, and others damn near impossible; but in the end it relies on an era that ceased to exist decades ago.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
AppleScript was cool for the power-user (the one who knows how to make Excel macros and has an idea of what a loop and a if clause are). Very limited in many ways, but still cool. You could whip up a workflow in instants, and it would always work.
I'm a bit out of the field of no-code / low-code nowadays but I have a feeling that tools that have the simplicity of Touch Develop / AppleScript are kind of missing for the Android / iOS ecosystems. And for the power-user, I feel such tools would be a much better
What an OS used to be like (Score:2)
I feel for those students from 2011 (Score:2)
a Microsoft Research video from CS Education Week 2011 shows enthusiastic Washington high school students participating in an hour-long TouchDevelop coding lesson and demonstrating the apps they created that tapped into music, photos, the Internet, and yes, even their phone's functionality.
Imagine being those kids. Big STEM project, sponsored by one of the biggest names in STEM. They're making videos, you're excited, you're being told it's The Next Big Thing. Now here we are in 2025 and nobody even knows what Touch Develop is.*
Talk about a rug-pull. I'm all for teaching STEM to kids, but this is exactly why you shouldn't ever let the STEM program be run on some proprietary bullshit sponsored by Big Tech.
*But it does sound kinda pervy to put "Touch Develop" and "high school students" in the sa
Re: (Score:3)
20 years ago me and a whole lot of other people burned a whole lot of time building software with XML as a replacement for legacy/proprietary data formats like EDIFACT etc. XML didn't die, but a lot of the things like XSLT and stuff we spent a lot of time coding around are just not relevant or useful today. Such is life. There are still XML files all over the place, but mostly they are for configurations, not domain data or whatever you want to call it.
Over the years you get people telling you what the "nex
A code generator isn't AI (Score:2)