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Will Software that Writes Code Alter Tech's Script?


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Artist's representation of software that writes software.

Several companies are working on software that will be able to do most of the "grunt work" of writing software.

Credit: Lloyd Thatcher

Several companies are promising to turn the world of computer programming on its head by creating software that will be able to do most of the grunt work of writing software on its own.

"I predict that the next computing language will not be computer language but natural language, human language," says Guillaume Bouchard, member of a team of researchers at University College London working on code-writing software. Bouchard also is co-founder of Bloomsbury.ai, which plans to release a public demo of a program that enables users without any background in programming to write software within minutes.

Other companies seeking to develop such software include Queue Software and Bubble.is. Although they do not all share Bouchard's vision of software that could build any program based on a simple description, they do aspire to take the drudgery out of software development. Queue Software CEO Aidon Cunniffe says the inspiration for his company came from having to build the same code over and over for various clients and deciding to build a tool that could do that work while he focused on overall design.

Bouchard says the goal of such software is to free the world's 11 million programmers to "use their smartness in other domains."

From Financial Times
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