Trends & Controversies: Will Domain-Specific Code Synthesis Become a Silver Bullet?
In the commercial world, the biggest hurdles to delivering embedded intelligence in software are the software-engineering costs. We members of the intelligent-systems community have brilliant techniques available, and no end of applications is in sight, but the gap between intelligent-systems techniques and delivered software is too great. Standard programming languages and tools are too general-purpose, and the standard means of delivering a technology-as code libraries or new-fangled componentware-is simply too restricting for some specialties. One way would be through domain-specific code synthesis. Support for the development of domain-specific extensions to programming languages and of adaptive software-where code synthesis is in the inner-loop of a self-modifying programming system-would have a profound effect in this regard. This is the future of intelligent systems development.