Executable Archaeology of Programs That Model Programming: Reanimating the Heuristic Compiler (1961) and KBEmacs (1984)

arXiv cs.AIOctober 28, 2026en

arXiv:2610.36341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Early AI programs were often also theories of how people think, and programs that wrote programs were, in part, theories of how people program. Here we report on the reanimation of two such programs that offer two seemingly different theories of programming and were developed for quite different purposes. The first, Herbert Simon's Heuristic Compiler (1961), was an experimental model of programming as problem-solving, applying the means-ends analysis methods of the General Problem Solver to investigate the nature of the programming task. The second, KBEmacs (1984), was a working prototype of an intelligent programming assistant developed by MIT

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