Macho: Programming with Man Pages

Despite years of work on programming languages, programming is still slow and error-prone. In this paper we describe Macho, a system which combines a natural language parser, a database of code, and an automated debugger to write simple programs from natural language and examples of their correct execution. Adding examples to natural language makes it easier for Macho to actually generate a correct program, because it can test its candidate solutions and fix simple errors. Macho is able to synthesize basic versions of six out of nine small coreutils from short natural language descriptions based on their man pages and sample runs.