The biggest problem with building software is that it’s expensive and it’s slow. There are far more software development jobs than there are engineers, and consequently they’re highly-paid. On top of that, if you want to build an app, you currently have to hire at least two dev teams — one for Android, and one for iOS, and you probably need a third team in order to build your backend database and plumbing, and a fourth to build your web services.
Things are pretty bad in this regard, but the IoT is about to make this problem worse — a lot worse. The IoT’s trend of device proliferation is moving in *precisely* the wrong direction, and pretty soon in addition to the two major mobile device platforms, there’ll be several flavors of AR headgear. Your home, car, microwave, and stereo will all be connected, and all of that will require software to be written. We’re about to experience a form factor explosion, and pretty soon, you won’t need four dev teams — you’ll need ten, which simply isn’t feasible.
We’ve solved this major problem by inventing an entirely new programming language called ‘Rox’ based on a new technology called ‘pebbling’ that the market hasn’t seen before. Rox is the programming language of the RWW, and it’s so easy to use that regular, non-technical people can learn it quickly and build complex, multi-app, real-world services. We dramatically decrease software engineering costs and times by a factor of ~100X, and with our platform, creative types can run circles around today’s professional software engineers.
Pebbling is a very powerful tool that has been used academically by theoretical computer scientists for research purposes, proving theorems, writing papers, and attending conferences. We’re the first ones to liberate pebbling from its academic roots and apply what we learned from our own Ph.D. research (for more information, please refer here and here) to create Rox, a programming language designed just for the RWW.
To provide a little more background, pebbling is a board game that can be played with pencil and paper and is so easy to understand that even 5- and 6-year-olds can play it. However, it’s also extremely powerful and can be used to capture all computations. Usually these two properties don’t coexist at the same time; normally, when a technology is extremely powerful, you have to pay for that power in terms of complexity. Pebbling runs contrary to this rule in that it’s simultaneously very easy to understand but also extremely powerful.
We recognized that we could exploit this fact in order to create Rox, a programming language unlike any that the world has seen before. It’s entirely graphical in nature. It doesn’t have a grammar or a syntax. You don’t type your code, but instead you draw it. If you can use Photoshop, Maya, or SimCity, you can use this. When programming in Rox, one barely ever even needs to use the keyboard — it’s almost completely mouse-driven. Have a look a program drawn in Rox below and notice that it feels a lot more like drawing a diagram than it does like writing code.
Rox is designed for designers; it’s designed for marketers; it’s designed for regular people who aren’t technical but who are smart and creative. We’re democratizing programming so that it’s accessible to everyone, not just those with computer science degrees. This in turn will expand the pool of available software engineers and further reduce development costs.
Rox is device agnostic, which means that you can program an app once and it’ll work on any hardware. Rox is also “Turing Complete”, which means that it’s just as powerful as languages such as Java, Python or C++. If you can program an app in Java, then you can program it with Rox, only much faster and without the need for expensive software engineers. In fact, using Rox, a single non-technical creative person can vastly outperform an entire professional engineering team using traditional tools.
On the RWW, software development costs won’t be measured in budget because we’re compressing those costs by ~100X. It won’t be measured in engineering headcount because you won’t need any, and it won’t be measured in months, but rather in days. With Rox, the new metrics for measuring engineering will be design and creativity.
In addition to massively compressing the costs of building software as well as development times, Rox is designed to connect all of the technology in the real world. Unlike any other programming language, it’s made for the place where the physical and digital worlds intersect. Using Rox, it’s easy to write software that makes the real world clickable using a concept called ‘triggers’.
