Richard, There has been striking improvement in the deductive power of modern programming IDE's (Integrated Development Environment). I too considered the approach you describe. I use NetBeans for Java development. It must keep at least one representation of the source code syntax tree to perform such operations as refactoring. It has clever templates for code completion and so forth. NetBeans, like its peers, has a plug-in architecture in which a developer-written component can obtain access to, and modify the internal program editor state.
I have an intuition that I can describe in English what I want the system to automatically program, but I am not ruling out an alternate GUI dialog modality, especially to improve the cognitive bandwidth of this particular dialog situation. Does SAFAIRE support a conventional programming language? -Steve Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 ----- Original Message ---- From: Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Wednesday, February 6, 2008 11:30:55 AM Subject: Re: [agi] Reading on automatic programming? Stephen Reed wrote: > Richard, > I entirely agree with your comments. I would like to eventually > stop > programming in Java and have the system do that for me. I am > strongly > motivated to build its dialog component first because that > addresses the > issue of how to collaborate with the system when the "rough seas" > are > encountered. > -Steve It looks like we are moving in similar directions, then. Half of my attention at the moment is on the problem of automatic programming, but I am coming at it from the direction of producing a software development environment that has as much intelligence as possible built into it. My line of attack is to look at the "dialog" between the environment (it is called SAFAIRE - pronounced "sapphire") and the user, and to make the dialog as non-verbal as possible. Not because I hate language as such, but because I see language as a poor medium for the human to understand software systems, and a less-than-perfect way for the human to communicate their intentions to the system. Under the hood, SAFAIRE has the AGI design that I am working on. The work is thus nicely bootstrapped: the problems of learning how to program, and how to relate to the user, are a good test domain for the AGI component, and the emerging software development environment is a good (make that indispensible!) tool for developing the underlying AGI. One other vital component of the project, which I am having trouble with, is a [number of hours in the day] generator..... 8-) Richard Loosemore > ----- Original Message ---- > From: Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: agi@v2.listbox.com > Sent: Wednesday, February 6, 2008 10:16:34 AM > Subject: Re: [agi] Reading on automatic programming? > > [snip] > It seems to me that most AP approaches are geared toward the > "plain > sailing" problems that do not have the nasty little issues > described > above, and that the "rough seas" type of problems are postponed > for > another day. Since an awful lot of good work can go into > solving plain > sailing systems that are very large (Czarnecki & Eisenecker, for > example), it can seem like good progress is being made. I think > what > then happens is that people do not realise that, in order to go > on to > the nasty type of programming problem (i.e. 99% of all programming > problems), all the previous work may count for nothing, because it > did > not even in principle address such deep issues as what to do if > the only > way forward is to find the right textbook, read a couple of > pages, and > understand it. > > Of course, the same criticism can be levelled at many approaches > to the > entire AI problem, never mind just the AP problem. :-) > > > Richard Loosemore ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?& ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=94235932-ddae41