The Past and Future of Machine Programming in Academia and Industry (A Retrospective and Forecast)

Machine programming (MP) is principally concerned with the automation of software development. Different than program synthesis, MP targets all aspects of software development such as automating debugging, testing, and profiling code, amongst other things. In this talk, we discuss the foundations of MP and consider its impact across three views: (i) academia, (ii) established corporations, and (iii) startup ventures.

We begin with the “The Three Pillars of Machine Programming” and the formation of the ACM SIGPLAN Machine Programming Symposium (MAPS) both in 2017. We then discuss critical developments that occurred in MP over the last five years leading us to today, including some potential missteps. We then forecast the future of MP over the next five years, including discussing some obvious upcoming developments (e.g., AI-coding partners) and some less obvious ones (e.g., semantic reasoners, transpilation, intentional programming languages, etc.).