Program Synthesis for the Masses

New computing platforms have greatly increased the demand for programmers, but learning to program remains a big challenge. Program synthesis has the potential to revolutionize programming by making it more accessible. My work has focused on two goals: making programming more intuitive through the use of new interfaces, and using automated feedback to help students learn programming. In this talk, I will present my work on two systems that work towards these goals: Autograder and FlashFill. The Autograder system provides automated feedback to students on introductory programming assignments, and was successfully piloted on thousands of programming exercises from edX. The FlashFill system helps end-users perform repetitive data transformations over strings, numbers, and tables using input-output examples. A part of FlashFill was shipped as part of Excel 2013 and was quoted as one of the top features by many press reviews. I will describe how ideas from advances in constraint-solving, machine learning, and formal verification enabled the new forms of interaction required by these systems.