1. "Find a bug in a program, and fix it, and the
program will work today. Show the program
how to find and fix a bug, and the program
will work forever."
-Oliver Selfridge

2. A Discussion on
Automatic Programming
Corey A. Spitzer
BarCamp Omaha
August, 2008

3. Automatic Programming?

4. "What would you say...
you do here?"

5. •Gather and document requirements
•Design and document the solution
•Code the framework, architecture, and/or
scaffolding/plumbing
•Set up storage, code data access layer (mundane
persistence and CRUD stuff)
•Code business logic
•UI design and development
•Refactor, refactor again, update docs
•Debug, debug again
•Tests (unit, integration, penetration, load, stress,
usability, etc.)
•Documentation
•Deploy, get feedback
•Monitor, support, perform maintenance

6. Scaffolding

7. Model Driven Architecture

8. Documentation Generation

9. Documentation Generation

10. Round-trip Engineering

11. Natural Language Programming

12. Metafor

13. To create the background:
Draw the screen's box with the white color.
osmosian.com's Loop.
Pick a spot anywhere in the screen's box.
"Plain English"
Pick a color between the lightest gray color and the
white color.
Dab the color on the spot.
If a counter is past 80000, break.
If the counter is evenly divisible by 1000, refresh the
screen.
Repeat.
Extract the background given the screen's box. *dahd
or Create the background from the screen. Or
something.
To create a work given a URL:
Allocate memory for the work.
Put the URL into the work's URL.
To create some works given a buffer:
Destroy the works.
Put nil into the current work.

14. My Recipe

15. public abstract class Function
{
handleActionFromUI(String action)
{
// run this function
Collection returnCollection = performAction(action);
return returnCollection;
}
public abstract Collection performAction(String action);
}

16. public abstract class Function
{
handleActionFromUI(String action)
{
// create a unique test name
// run this function
Collection returnCollection = performAction(action);
return returnCollection;
}
public abstract Collection performAction(String action);
}

17. public abstract class Function
{
handleActionFromUI(String action)
{
// create a unique test name
// save the present environment and state
// run this function
Collection returnCollection = performAction(action);
return returnCollection;
}
public abstract Collection performAction(String action);
}

18. public abstract class Function
{
handleActionFromUI(String action)
{
// create a unique test name
// save the present environment and state
// generate code to load the present environment and state
// run this function
Collection returnCollection = performAction(action);
return returnCollection;
}
public abstract Collection performAction(String action);
}

19. public abstract class Function
{
handleActionFromUI(String action)
{
// create a unique test name
// save the present environment and state
// generate code to load the present environment and state
// generate code to instantiate and run this function with
// current inputs
// run this function
Collection returnCollection = performAction(action);
return returnCollection;
}
public abstract Collection performAction(String action);
}

20. public abstract class Function
{
handleActionFromUI(String action)
{
// create a unique test name
// save the present environment and state
// generate code to load the present environment and state
// generate code to instantiate and run this function with
// current inputs
// run this function
Collection returnCollection = performAction(action);
// generate code to assert the output from running the test code
// will be the same output as it is now
return returnCollection;
}
public abstract Collection performAction(String action);
}

21. public void testLoginController_login_cas_100
{
loadState("login_cas_100.sql");
HashMap<String, String> output = runFunction("foo", "bar", 123);
assertEquals("blah", output.get("foo"));
...
}
public void testMyController_doSomething_cas_100
{
...
}
public void testMyController_doSomething_cas_101
{
...
}

22. But wait... There's more!

24. Sources and Useful Links
Doxygen
http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/
Object Management Group
http://www.omg.org/mda/
Code Generation Network
http://www.codegeneration.net
Ruby on Rails
http://www.rubyonrails.org
Django
http://www.djangoproject.com
Metafor Info
http://ll4.csail.mit.edu/slides/metafor.pdf