Debugging in Plain English? 274
sameerdesai writes "CNN is carrying a story about Researchers from Carnegie Melon: Myers and a graduate student, Andrew Ko, have developed a debugging program that lets users ask questions about computer errors in plain English: Why didn't a program behave as expected? I guess with recent exploits and bugs that were found this will soon be a hot research topic or tool in the market." We recently did a story about revolutionary debugging techniques; the researchers' website has some papers and other information.
Interesting article until the catch at the end (Score:5, Informative)
"Adding Whyline to a different language, like Java, which is 10 times as complex, could limit how much Whyline can help. So Whyline is a very long way from getting incorporated into the world's most widespread software, Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system. (When asked about its own debugging efforts, Microsoft didn't comment.)"
Which means at the moment its all speculation, and only works for very simple (hello world) applications. By the time this program is useful, we'll have robots (like Millenium man), who will do all the debugging...
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Brad Myers! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sounds good... (Score:2, Informative)
It's Carnegie Mellon (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Deja vue (Score:3, Informative)
" An exception chain is a list of all the exceptions generated in response to a single root exception (say, a SQLException). As each exception is caught and converted to a higher-level exception for rethrowing, it's added to the chain. This provides a complete record of how an exception is handled "
Other languages are better than English (Score:3, Informative)
When I lived in South Africa I could speak pidgin Zulu and Xhosa and studied Xhosa at university. If I recall, Xhosa had 16 noun groups and seven tenses. This means that Xhosa is far less ambiguous as to the relationship between things. Verbs are spoken with the subject and object noun group prefixes attached. Thus the verb for "hit" is different when applied to a dog as opposed to a tree. This potentially helps remove a lot of the confusion in human/machine natural language interfaces. Problem though is finding enough Xhosa programmers and Xhosa people wanting to buy your product.