Formal Language Learning with Correction Queries. A New Approach in Active Learning

Seibel: What makes a program beautiful? Allen: That it is a simple straightforward solution to a problem; that has some intrinsic structure and obviousness about it that isnБЂ™t obvious from the problem itself. I picked up probably a habit from that of learning about programming and learning about a new language by taking an existing program and studying it. Seibel: How do you read code? LetБЂ™s say youБЂ™re going to learn a new language and you find a program to readБЂ”how do you attack it? Allen: Well, one example was one of my employees had built a parser. This was later on for the PTRAN project. And I wanted to understand his methods. ItБЂ™s actually probably the best parser in the worldБЂ”now itБЂ™s out in open source, and itБЂ™s really an extraordinary parser that can do error correction in flight. I wanted to understand it, so I took it and read it. And I knew that Philippe Charles, the man who had written it, was a beautiful programmer. The way I would approach understanding a new language or a new implementation of some very complex problem would be to take a program from somebody that I knew was a great programmer, and read it ...»