Herb.jl: Teaching programs how to program

Wouldn't it be great if a computer could program itself? You simply tell it what you want, magic happens, and you have your program. While this is still a farfetched dream, here we will introduce you to Herb.jl, a Julia library that gets us a step closer to this big goal through program synthesis: the task of automatically generating programs from a given specification.Herb.jl serves two main goals. First, it aims to provide a missing toolbox for developing new program synthesisers, which is currently missing in the community. Second, it aims to unify many different flavours of program synthesis under a joint framework, making existing program synthesisers easy to use on new problems.In this talk we will give a high-level introduction to program synthesis. We will present Herb.jl and show how Julia facilitates the library development on one hand, but also algorithm speed and composability of the synthesis procedure.We will also address the challenges of realising such a software project in an academic setting, where a mix of researchers, PhDs, students and RSEs contribute to the library. A recording of this session is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/HPnjDg77q-Y