Art Imitates Life: Programming by Example as an Imitation Game

Having the computer imitate recorded human actions is the basis for an experimental technology for programming, variously called "Programming by Example" or "Programming by Demonstration". This is an under-appreciated technology that holds the promise of revolutionizing programming and making it more accessible, especially to non-expert programmers. Because imitation is a natural learning strategy for people, it can help alleviate the barriers of abstraction and lack of short-term memory that makes programming difficult for people. Much past work has focused on how to represent the recorded actions, and how to generalize the resulting procedures so that they can be applicable to examples analogous to those on which the system is taught. This chapter will survey past work in the field and speculate on how the mechanics of imitative behavior might inform future developments, especially the feedback loop of verifying that imitative behavior has the desired result in new situations.