[throwawaykeno]

> You could theoretically make it into a board game

But not actually. Program synthesis is hard even if you have perfect formal requirements. In practice, gathering formal requirements is by far the most difficult task. You're probably better off building a system using modern development practices than trying to collect formal requirements Let alone translating those requirements into code, which is easier than coming up with the requirements but still difficult.

> Recently AI has proved...

FYI, it's not as if the program synthesis folks haven't heard of neural nets... you're giving researchers who actually do this stuff all day surprisingly little credit.

[Houshalter]

I think that getting the formal requirements is in some ways easier than programming. People can describe the things they want the computer to do, like sorting a list so it's all in order. Actually coming up with an algorithm that does that efficiently is much harder, and is where bugs come from.

I mean yes good program synthesis wouldn't replace programmers on it's own. But it would radically change how programming is done and make our lives much easier.

I'm just saying that AI is a quickly advancing field and predictions like "not in 20 years" have been defied months later. Applying deep reinforcement learning to tasks like game playing is relatively novel, and has only really started to succeed in the last 2 years.