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Comment by jgable | Hacker News Reader

"... In fact, this is already happening, in part because programmers increasingly rely on 'self-correcting' code—that is, code that debugs and rewrites itself ..."

What on earth is the author talking about? I've never heard of self-correcting code, certainly never used it, and can't find a reasonable reference to it with a google search. Is he mistakenly referring to "Error-Correcting Code", that is, using redundancy in data storage or transmission to catch and correct for random bit flips?

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Wow, my opinion of the editing process at the New York Review of Books has just dropped, by a lot. It's not just that it's a bizarre claim, but that it's also stated so matter-of-factly. Honestly, the writer probably talked to a coder friend who uses an IDE, and the way the coder described auto-completion and type-checking extensions sounded very much like "self-correcting" code.

No matter what you think of difficulties of the Turing halting problem, I'd say that writers depend --and can benefit -- far more on "self-correcting" writing (particularly auto-correct) than programmers do on self-correcting code.

I think you're overreacting. The author could well be talking about neural nets, deep learning, etc. We may choose to nitpick or discuss the overall point.

When anyone critiques information technology who is not already in the community, we seem to prefer to nitpick.

That could be the next part "machines that are able to learn on the job", but that's not "code that debugs and rewrites itself".

It's not a far stretch that laymen conflate "code" with "statistical learning algorithms."

I googled 'self-correcting code' because I thought the same thing! Definitely a bizarre claim.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~clegoues/docs/legoues-icse09.pdf "Automatically Finding Patches Using Genetic Programming ... We introduce a fully automated method for locating and repairing bugs in software" http://dijkstra.cs.virginia.edu/genprog/

Though I think the author was talking more about coding up a neural net, where it can be said that the net learns the features itself, and optimizes a loss function, without much reliance on a superviser.

I can't believe the hubris of the tech industry. I bet no one even considers the danger that their ECC RAM becomes self-aware.

Perhaps linters, auto-formatters, auto-complete, etc. I could understand that it could look like "self-correcting code" to a non-programmer.

Given the level of cluelesness needed to write something like this, I'd guess that he's referring to smart Java and C# IDEs. To somebody clueless, all this automatic refactoring, code cleanup suggestions, stylistic fixes, etc. could look like "code that debugs and rewrites itself".

Perhaps he's talking about compilers optimizing code?

Analogously , "journalists rely on 'self-correcting' articles - that is, an article that 'debugs' and rewrites itself...".

Hype article with FUD

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