Talk:Programming by demonstration

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Programming by demonstration is within the scope of WikiProject Robotics, an attempt to standardise coverage of Robotics. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this notice, or visit the project page, where you can join the project or contribute to the discussion.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the Project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.
???	This article has not yet received an importance rating on the importance scale.

The distinction between PBD and PBE for robotics and software researchers is not right, PBD is used quite often by researchers in human-computer interaction, for example. (Unsigned comment)

I know of Programming by example only via software. I was at U.C. Berkeley when PhD candidate Dan Halbert, a student of Susan Graham's, was doing his thesis work on PBE at Xerox PARC. (I think he also did his masters work on that topic.) As I noted in a recent edit here, PbE goes back at least to the mid-80s as a term in software research. PbE as a concept -- well, read the Halbert dissertation I just linked. IIRC, he traces it back quite a few years earlier, at least as far back as some UI work by Warren Teitelman.

If anything, I'd prefer separate PbE/PbD articles, with a note in each that there seems to be some terminology overlap between the robotics uses of PbE/PbD (which as an idea must certainly go back at least as far as Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano?) and the user-interface support idea of PbE Classic (Halbert/PARC). If you're coming from robotics, look at it this way: maybe PbD is very useful in robotics, so why would you want it associated in any way whatsoever with Microsoft Bob, or Clippy, or that incredibly irritating dolphin that used to swim out at you in Windows (all of which were attempts to make PbE work "for the masses", in Halbert's original vision)? On the other hand, if the two terms really are used interchangeably in both UI work and in robotics, I guess there should be one article after all. :-( Yakushima (talk) 15:21, 26 May 2008 (UTC)