Debugging in Plain English?

sameerdesai writes "CNN is carrying a story about Researchers from Carnegie Melon: Myers and a graduate student, Andrew Ko, have developed a debugging program that lets users ask questions about computer errors in plain English: Why didn't a program behave as expected? I guess with recent exploits and bugs that were found this will soon be a hot research topic or tool in the market." We recently did a story about revolutionary debugging techniques; the researchers' website has some papers and other information.

Comments

Interesting article until the catch at the end

[samsmithnz]

"Whyline, has been used only to debug programs in Alice, an academic programming language with a limited vocabulary of commands to make interactive 3-D worlds, like video games."

"Adding Whyline to a different language, like Java, which is 10 times as complex, could limit how much Whyline can help. So Whyline is a very long way from getting incorporated into the world's most widespread software, Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system. (When asked about its own debugging efforts, Microsoft didn't comment.)"

Which means at the moment its all speculation, and only works for very simple (hello world) applications. By the time this program is useful, we'll have robots (like Millenium man), who will do all the debugging...