Re: Check for redundancy

[Stefan Nobis]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

[want to check for redundancy in code]
> Yeah, this is extremely difficult to accomplish at any
> level and to get it to be actually useful in practice
> is close to impossible. And it is not needed.

Hmmm... at least for some people it seems important enough:

https://www.devexpress.com/Products/CodeRush/duplicate_code.xml

CodeRush is a (commercial) plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio and it
has some redundancy detection and removing abilities built in. I only
played a little bit with it and it is indeed quite impressing and
disappointing at the same time. Nevertheless, I think at least for
junior programmers it might have some value (and for programmers in
the industry with a high time pressure; its helpful to refactor
redundancies with just a press of a button and adding some new names).

> I dare say the AI methods will *never* be able to do this!

AI methods today are even able to identify important and influential
paintings in the history of art:

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/538281/machine-vision-algorithm-chooses-the-most-creative-paintings-in-history/

Detecting patterns is one of the strong areas of machine learning and
redundancy is a pattern. I would assume that AI methods will at least
someday be quite good at it.

-- 
Stefan.