Self-completing programs
Since he was a graduate student, Armando Solar-Lezama, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has been working on a programming language called Sketch, which allows programmers to simply omit some of the computational details of their code. Sketch then automatically fills in the gaps.If it’s fleshed out and made more user-friendly, Sketch could ultimately make life easier for software developers. But in the meantime, it’s proving its worth as the basis for other tools that exploit the mechanics of “program synthesis,” or automatic program generation. Recent projects at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory that have built on Sketch include a system for automatically grading programming assignments for computer science classes, a system that converts hand-drawn diagrams into code, and a system that produces SQL database queries from code written in Java.At this year’s Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation Conference, Solar-Lezama and...