Human-Centric Program Synthesis

Author Will Crichton



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Author Details

Will Crichton
  • Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my advisor Pat Hanrahan for his everlasting support despite my constantly evolving research direction. And a big thanks to Brian Hempel, Georgia Gabriela Sampaio, and my anonymous reviewers for constructive comments that substantially improved the quality of this paper.

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Will Crichton. Human-Centric Program Synthesis. In 10th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU 2019). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 76, pp. 5:1-5:5, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.PLATEAU.2019.5

Abstract

Program synthesis techniques offer significant new capabilities in searching for programs that satisfy high-level specifications. While synthesis has been thoroughly explored for input/output pair specifications (programming-by-example), this paper asks: what does program synthesis look like beyond examples? What actual issues in day-to-day development would stand to benefit the most from synthesis? How can a human-centric perspective inform the exploration of alternative specification languages for synthesis? I sketch a human-centric vision for program synthesis where programmers explore and learn languages and APIs aided by a synthesis tool.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Programming by example
Keywords
  • Program synthesis
  • programming by example
  • PL/HCI

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