DARPA invests in software development tool 'semi-automatic'

The Advanced Defense Projects Agency (DARPA) has invested $ 11 million in Rice University (USA) to develop the PLINY project that simplifies the software development process. The goal of the project is to create a huge open source code repository that comes with an auto-complete programming tool that allows programmers to create software quickly with just one search operation. simple

The project is named after Pliny the Elder, the wise man who lived under Roman times, the author of the first encyclopedia in history. Therefore, the naming of this scholar to the name also contains deep meaning: "PLINY will be the largest and deepest repository of code in the world, allowing the programmer to write just a few lines of code. First, then press a button in the tool and all the rest will appear below to form a complete application. "

Associate Professor Rice Swarat Chaudhuri said that the code will be automatically "shown below" and will work continuously with the code that the programmer wrote above. He also noted that this would be an open source code repository and that it could be continuously maintained, updated and finalized by future users themselves.

In the above video, Chaudhuri uses a piece of circular hole in the middle to simulate the operation principle of the PLINY toolkit . Then, the tool searches for billions of lines of code in the database to find the most feasible solution (colored pieces of paper with different shapes). Once it has found the best solution, the tool will automatically cut off unneeded parts and complete the piece to fit the hole. A great idea and hopefully we will soon see the results of the project over the next four years with the efforts of dozens of researchers at Rice University.

References: Engadget, Rice University