POWER TOOLS FOR PROGRAMMERS

This chapter discusses the power tools for programmers. Essentially, all of the intelligent programming tools described in this volume are at most experimental prototypes. Given that these tools are still quite far from being commercial realities, it is worthwhile to note that there is a completely different way in which artificial intelligence research has to help programmers. Artificial intelligence researchers are themselves programmers. Creating such programs is more a problem of exploration than implementation and does not conform to conventional software lifecycle models. The artificial intelligence programming community has always been faced with this kind of exploratory programming and has, therefore, had a head start on developing appropriate language, environment, and hardware features. Redundancy protects the design from unintentional change, the conventional programming technology restrains the programmer, and the programming languages used in exploratory systems minimize and defer constraints on the programmer.