Automatic Programming How Far can Machines Go?

Program synthesis is the wild west beyond code generators and onward toward self-programming systems. What can it do for us? The answer, right now, is not a lot. It can harness the wisdom of the crowd to help reproduce scenarios that are repeated often, and in narrow scopes tools can make educated guesses about what the programmer intended, but full automatic program synthesis is likely impossible. Specifically because of this, it becomes most interesting to explore what it can't and won't be able to do on its own. Self-programming systems might be past the horizon, but getting a human more involved makes a big difference, and while the computer might never program for us, it might make for a decent pair-programming partner. We'll look at glimpses of this future, in academia and outside it, and see why they're more IDE plugins and less the robot apocalypse.