If a human can rewrite code from one language to do the same thing in another language, it's definitely possible to automate. But I acknowledge that translation will be very difficult to achieve. Saying something is impossible because it's very hard is ultimately self-limiting.
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Your line of thinking actually underscores the difference in research philosophy between the ARPAs (making the seemingly impossible possible) and other research funding bodies (which place a high premium on lower risk, incremental progress).
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I spent a decade doing biomedical research in academia, and it was only when I joined
@IARPAnews that I became acutely aware of how constrained my thinking had become about what is feasible in science and engineering, purely due to the funding culture in academia.0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes -
It's a whole research area in and of itself. If it were that easy, like Grant said, it would be everywhere. 1 of many reasons is cos the compilers are diff. Maybe some mapping exists for basic stuff but it's likely if, and that's a big if, it did compile the code would be slow.
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Replying to @o_guest @usethespacebar and
Imagine testing this translation. You'd be up against some serious compsci maths and testing to prove the software is equivalent too. A nightmare to to debug. Just rewrite the code
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"Just rewrite the code," when the code you want rewritten was homebrewed by 20,000 different labs without the time or necessarily the expertise to rewrite it, is actually a much harder problem to solve than trying to solve the automation problem outright.
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Replying to @neurowitz @o_guest and
Is there a constrained version of this problem for which it would seem more feasible to you?
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Rewriting the code is probably for the best even if you could translate it. It would force you to adopt more modern standards, tighten the spec, write good docs and comments.
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From a sociological standpoint, that suggestion is as idealistic and borderline impossible as my original suggestion =)
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It's been done often. In fact reimplementing code is pretty much the only way (I know of) to keep it alive. I have done it myself. Pretty much all CS undergrads do it.
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Replying to @o_guest @neurowitz and
It's so a thing it has a Wikipedia page! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewrite_(programming) …
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