Human-Centric Program Synthesis
It addresses the problem of making program synthesis more practical and accessible for developers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing synthesis techniques.
The paper explores program synthesis beyond input/output examples, proposing a human-centric vision where synthesis tools help programmers learn languages and APIs.
Program synthesis techniques offer significant new capabilities in searching for programs that satisfy high-level specifications. While synthesis has been thoroughly explored for input/output pair specifications (programming-by-example), this paper asks: what does program synthesis look like beyond examples? What actual issues in day-to-day development would stand to benefit the most from synthesis? How can a human-centric perspective inform the exploration of alternative specification languages for synthesis? I sketch a human-centric vision for program synthesis where programmers explore and learn languages and APIs aided by a synthesis tool.