Teaching of Procedures-Progress Report

The idea of building a programmer is very seductive in that it holds the promise of massive bootstrapping and thus ties in with many ideas about learning and teaching. I will avoid going into those issues here. It is necessary, however, to explain what I am not working on. I am not interested in dev...

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Main Author: Sussman, Gerald Jay
Language:en_US
Published: 2004
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/5828
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author Sussman, Gerald Jay
author_facet Sussman, Gerald Jay
author_sort Sussman, Gerald Jay
collection MIT
description The idea of building a programmer is very seductive in that it holds the promise of massive bootstrapping and thus ties in with many ideas about learning and teaching. I will avoid going into those issues here. It is necessary, however, to explain what I am not working on. I am not interested in developing new and better languages for expressing algorithms. When FORTRAN was invented, it was touted as an automatic programmer, and indeed it was, as it relieved the user of complete specification of the details of implementation. Newer programming languages are just elaborations (usually better) of that basic idea. I am, however, interested in the problem of implementation of a partially specified algorithm rather tan a complete algorithm and a partially specified implementation. This problem is truly in the domain of Artificial Intelligence because the system which "solves" this problem needs a great deal of knowledge about the problem domain for which te algorithm is being constructed in order to "reasonably" complete the specification. Indeed, a programmer is not told exactly the algorithm to be implemented, he is told the problem which his program is expected to solve.
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spelling mit-1721.1/58282019-04-12T08:28:02Z Teaching of Procedures-Progress Report Sussman, Gerald Jay The idea of building a programmer is very seductive in that it holds the promise of massive bootstrapping and thus ties in with many ideas about learning and teaching. I will avoid going into those issues here. It is necessary, however, to explain what I am not working on. I am not interested in developing new and better languages for expressing algorithms. When FORTRAN was invented, it was touted as an automatic programmer, and indeed it was, as it relieved the user of complete specification of the details of implementation. Newer programming languages are just elaborations (usually better) of that basic idea. I am, however, interested in the problem of implementation of a partially specified algorithm rather tan a complete algorithm and a partially specified implementation. This problem is truly in the domain of Artificial Intelligence because the system which "solves" this problem needs a great deal of knowledge about the problem domain for which te algorithm is being constructed in order to "reasonably" complete the specification. Indeed, a programmer is not told exactly the algorithm to be implemented, he is told the problem which his program is expected to solve. 2004-10-01T20:47:02Z 2004-10-01T20:47:02Z 1972-10-01 AIM-270 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/5828 en_US AIM-270 22 p. 8348451 bytes 593449 bytes application/postscript application/pdf application/postscript application/pdf
spellingShingle Sussman, Gerald Jay
Teaching of Procedures-Progress Report
title Teaching of Procedures-Progress Report
title_full Teaching of Procedures-Progress Report
title_fullStr Teaching of Procedures-Progress Report
title_full_unstemmed Teaching of Procedures-Progress Report
title_short Teaching of Procedures-Progress Report
title_sort teaching of procedures progress report
url http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/5828
work_keys_str_mv AT sussmangeraldjay teachingofproceduresprogressreport