DARPA funds $11 million tool that will make coding a lot easier

DARPA is funding a new project by Rice University called PLINY, and it's neither a killer robot nor a high-tech weapon. PLINY, named after Pliny the Elder who wrote one of the earliest encyclopedias ever, will actually be a tool that can automatically complete a programmer's draft -- and yes, it will work somewhat like the autocomplete on your smartphones.

Its developers describe it as a repository of terabytes upon terabytes of all the open-source code they'll find, which people will be able to query in order to easily create complex software or quickly finish a simple one. Rice University assistant professor Swarat Chaudhuri says he and his co-developers "envision a system where the programmer writes a few of lines of code, hits a button and the rest of the code appears." Also, the parts PLINY conjures up "should work seamlessly with the code that's already been written."