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Rice University leads $11M effort in big data software analytics

news.rice.edu

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Re: Rice University leads $11M effort in big data software analytics

#11

Post by bhudman »

VLM wrote: post #5

As usual, the future is already here, just unevenly distributed. https://github.com/capitaomorte/yasnippet I do wonder if you gave $11M to João Távora what the end result would be. Probably pretty cool.

Grants like there baffle me. Having worked for the university, it is a lot about how you phrase the proposal so you can get the approvers to issue the grant. Someone had suggested ya-snippet and it already solves many of their goals. I am skeptical about the auto-correct feature

Re: Rice University leads $11M effort in big data software analytics

#12

Post by jimbokun »

From this article, I have absolutely no idea what this software will actually do.

Can anyone enlighten me as to what they are actually trying to do, from the perspective of an actual software developer?

Or did they just successfully string together the correct sequence of buzz words to unlock the grant money?

Re: Rice University leads $11M effort in big data software analytics

#13

Post by chadmckenna »

"PLINY is part of DARPA’s Mining and Understanding Software Enclaves (MUSE) program, an initiative that seeks to gather hundreds of billions of lines of publicly available open-source computer code and to mine that code to create a searchable database of properties, behaviors and vulnerabilities."

I feel that the reason DARPA is willing to fund this is because of that last part: "vulnerabilities".

Re: Rice University leads $11M effort in big data software analytics

#15

Post by ep103 »

mring33621 wrote: post #8

This is easy. IDE bot scrapes stackoverflow as you type. Ctrl-space to paste 'best' solution.

that's basically exactly what they're talking about. Though deployed in house it could be a nice way to see if the code you want to write already exists in a similar function elsewhere (and therefore perhaps should be refctored to run in both places). It might also catch copy pasters before they ruin a code base too. But otherwise yeah, shitty SO bot.

Re: Rice University leads $11M effort in big data software analytics

#17

Post by blktiger »

Autocomplete + the Internet already erodes many programmers skills to the point where they can barely write code without help. I can't imagine what this kind of tool would do.

Not that there is anything wrong with autocomplete. I certainly use it, but I've seen a lot of programmers that barely understand the code they are writing.

Re: Rice University leads $11M effort in big data software analytics

#18

Post by melling »

ColinCera wrote: post #2

“We envision a system where the programmer writes a few of lines of code, hits a button and the rest of the code appears. And not only that, the rest of the code should work seamlessly with the code that’s already been written.” I'm skeptical... 'Writing computer programs could become as easy as searching the Internet. A Rice University-led team of software experts has launched an $11 million effort to create a sophi…

A lot of programming is repetitive. It would be great if we could make some advances. On iOS, for example, Apple will generate a lot of code for you if, say, you want to create a uitableview. I could easily imagine we could tell it a few things and the entire method could be generated.

If we look at duplicate code across all projects on the Internet, maybe can simply pull from a larger database.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/191614/how-to-detect-code...

Anyway, it's easy to say that it can't be done. It's probably more worthwhile to try and tackle the problem and make some forward progress.

[Update]

Just saw this HN submission.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8562635

Microsoft can now autocomplete C# code by using Bing Code Search Engine based off of your comments.

///how to read file pth line by line

Pretty slick.

Re: Rice University leads $11M effort in big data software analytics

#20

Post by mojobot »

bhhaskin wrote: post #3
ColinCera wrote: post #2

“We envision a system where the programmer writes a few of lines of code, hits a button and the rest of the code appears. And not only that, the rest of the code should work seamlessly with the code that’s already been written.” I'm skeptical... 'Writing computer programs could become as easy as searching the Internet. A Rice University-led team of software experts has launched an $11 million effort to create a sophi…

I am right there with you. we already have "auto-complete". I am not sure what "auto-correct" would entail. My guess is fixing syntax errors, but i don't see how it could even address logic errors.

I am curious about how they will define correctness. With many parts in a system, code can look correct in its small unit, but not until it is running in the real world, is it obviously wrong.
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