Software developers: How plans to automate coding could mean big changes ahead

For the vast majority of humans, writing code is akin to learning a new language – but researchers from Intel and MIT are on a mission to change that. And the solution they are coming up with is to build code… that can code. Called machine programming, the field that the researchers are looking at is concerned with automating software development. And the team has just revealed a new tool that takes developers one step closer to the prospect of, one day, having machines that can program themselves. MISIM (Machine Inferred code Similarity), the new technology invented by Intel and MIT's labs, effectively studies snippets of code to understand what a piece of software intends to do.