Microsoft machine learning program tackles coding drudgery

Could machines, in time, write software themselves, and take programmers' jobs? At the very least, they might well provide the same boon automation has for many other fields: Remove some of the drudgery, and leave developers to do more creative work. A recently released research paper co-authored by Microsoft Research and the University of Cambridge discusses how a machine learning system called DeepCoder could learn to write small programs by using routines from other programs as raw material. It uses small snippets of code, only a few lines each, written in a custom, DSL (domain-specific language) to make it easier to analyze the input and output of each snippet. The better a match each snippet is to solving a particular problem, the more likely it'll end up as part of the solution.