Incidentally, of course, code generation doesn't necessarily need AI to
work.
Some years ago I was working with/on telephone exchange design, and
telephone system's are defined in no small part using formalised
structured language, notably UML and SDL. The UML was a tool largely to
help formalise the SDL, and we had an SDL compiler. I can't now remember
whether it went to a byte-code type output or to C/C++ ready for
compiling with a conventional compiler.
The same kind of thing is also quite commonly used in DSP and similar
environments (and my central heating controller, actually), where
functional block are dragged and dropped, configured and interconnected,
with little if any code actually written by the implementer.
My worry with a lot of the school-oriented stuff is the focus on
teaching "coding". I think "coding" should probably already
substantially be the past. In some respects I'm disappointed that we're
still doing so much, at least in the computer systems end of things
(most of my work is embedded, where small footprints very close to the
metal hold things up some).
Then again, it also seems to me that we've not really progressed very
far with tools. Lisp(58!), Prolog(72), Smalltalk(80), perl(87), tcl(88),
Python(89+), Java(91), Ruby(99).
Actually that's a bit depressing.
Gordon.
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