[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Edit: Also, everyone should go try the FlashFill feature in Microsoft excel. As far as I know, it's the only example of program synthesis shipped in a consumer facing production system, and it works shockingly well.

And it's not a giant language model trained on a gigantic dataset. Rather, if memory serves, it's a buch of task-specific DSLs and rules, all hand-written from scratch.

[GregarianChild]

I don't know how FlashFill works in 2020, but from [1] I learn that the original implementation was a brute-force enumeration (with clever heuristics along the lines of CDCL (= conflict-driven clause learning in SAT solvers) for speeding up common cases) of a small DSL for string manipulation. This was (and still is) the state-of-the-art approach to programming-by-example program synthesis.

[1] O. Polozov, S. Gulwani, FlashMeta: A Framework for Inductive Program Synthesis. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

[YeGoblynQueenne]

That's a nice, formal way of putting it, thank you :)

(Sorry I really should have refreshed my memory on Gulwani et al. I think I've even linked the paper on an HN comment before.)

Oh, btw, I doubt they're doing this with a language model nowadays. Unless FlashFill has suddendly started filling cells for email addresses with haikus etc...