Tim,
Thanks, input like this helps me try to think about the economic issues involved.
Can you talk a little about the depth of recursion already possible. How much assistance are these refactoring programs providing? Can the results the be used to speed up other programs or does can it only improve its own development, etc?
To quote from my essay relating to this:
"Refactoring: Refactoring involves performing rearrangements of code which preserve its function, and improve its readability and maintainability - or facilitate future improvements. Much refactoring is done by daemons - and their existence massively speeds up the production of working code. Refactoring daemons enable tasks which would previously have been intractable."
Refactoring programs are indispensable for most application progra...
The Open Thread posted at the beginning of the month has exceeded 500 comments – new Open Thread posts may be made here.
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.