I read the paper and frankly speaking, I am very skeptical that this is an application for the <i>masses</i>.<p>I found this piece interesting:<p>&#62;The Sikuli Search prototype has a database of 102 popular
computer books covering various operating systems (e.g.,
Windows XP, MacOS) and applications (e.g., Photoshop,
Office), all represented in PDF4. This database contains
more than 50k screenshots. The three-feature indexing
scheme is written in C++ to index these screenshots, using
SIFT [11] to extract visual features, Tesseract5 for OCR,
and Ferret6 for indexing the text surrounding the screenshots.
All other server-side functionality, such as accepting
queries and formatting search results, is implemented in
Ruby on Rails7 with a SQL database. On the client side, the
interfaces for searching and annotating screenshots are implemented
in Java.<p>... and the scripting engine is in Python.<p>Sometimes I wonder if Computer Science wouldn't have been better off with a constantly evolving <i>C</i> rather than all this mess. Every time I build a web application I feel as if I am building Frankenstein's body with different animal parts.<p>There were two major attempts to bring computers to the <i>masses</i> COBOL and SQL and they both managed to produce the opposite result rather than the masses using them a demand was created for very highly paid Programmer jobs! Electronic Engineers never attempted to teach the <i>masses</i> how to build TV's. In the late 80's I was teaching laymen things like 'How to Use MSDOS' and  'Introduction to Wordperfect' which paid for the rent but overall was a depressing experience. I also taught at the same time 'Pascal' and 'C' to Mechanical Engineers, my conclusion was that some people take to programming - like some people take to maths, they enjoy it and after an initial push they will teach themselves the rest and the rest will never touch programming even if their life depended on it.<p>In my mind the only successful 'programming for the masses' products are Excel and partly HTML.