[ColinCera]

“We envision a system where the programmer writes a few of lines of code, hits a button and the rest of the code appears. And not only that, the rest of the code should work seamlessly with the code that’s already been written.”

I'm skeptical...

'Writing computer programs could become as easy as searching the Internet. A Rice University-led team of software experts has launched an $11 million effort to create a sophisticated tool called PLINY that will both “autocomplete” and “autocorrect” code for programmers, much like the software that completes search queries and corrects spelling on today’s Web browsers and smartphones.'

Interested, but very, very skeptical...

[teraflop]

I'm reminded of one of Alan Perlis's "epigrams in programming":

"When someone says 'I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done,' give him a lollipop."

[simplemath]

I've seen plenty of platforms that write their own code from UI-type elements. That code is scary.

[AngrySkillzz]

More or less scary than the code generated by a compiler? The JavaScript you get out of a ClojureScript compiler is pretty scary, but it still runs reasonably well. Though I suppose it would be pretty hard to write additional JavaScript to interact with the generated code.

[simplemath]

>Though I suppose it would be pretty hard to write additional JavaScript to interact with the generated code.

[otoburb]

Rather like Adobe Dreamweaver back in the day. The code it generated was atrocious, but it really helped a lot of non-technical people build sites quickly with minimal "fuss".

[bhhaskin]

I am right there with you. we already have "auto-complete". I am not sure what "auto-correct" would entail. My guess is fixing syntax errors, but i don't see how it could even address logic errors.

[mojobot]

I am curious about how they will define correctness. With many parts in a system, code can look correct in its small unit, but not until it is running in the real world, is it obviously wrong.

[atwebb]

Able to identify common methods/algos/calls and correct a programmer's use of them, add in missing checks, remove unnecessary blocks/lines?

[bhhaskin]

A number of IDE's already do this. Eclipse has some nice features that do this.

[melling]

A lot of programming is repetitive. It would be great if we could make some advances. On iOS, for example, Apple will generate a lot of code for you if, say, you want to create a uitableview. I could easily imagine we could tell it a few things and the entire method could be generated.

If we look at duplicate code across all projects on the Internet, maybe can simply pull from a larger database.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/191614/how-to-detect-code...

Anyway, it's easy to say that it can't be done. It's probably more worthwhile to try and tackle the problem and make some forward progress.

[Update]

Just saw this HN submission.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8562635

Microsoft can now autocomplete C# code by using Bing Code Search Engine based off of your comments.

///how to read file pth line by line<TAB>

Pretty slick.

[lesterbuck]

"We envision a system where all Defense Department computers worldwide are connected with reliable networks based on packet switching." I'm sure language like that was in the original proposal for ARPAnet circa 1968, and I'm sure most professionals looked at that and were "very, very skeptical". DARPA has that "advanced research" in its name. If most professionals aren't "very, very skeptical" about the ultimate commercial success of their projects, I'd say they are doing it wrong.