Program Synthesis is the task of searching for programs over some underlying space that realize user's intent. There are three key dimensions in program synthesis: expression of user intent, space of programs over which to search, and the search technique. This article illustrates these dimensions while taking an application centric view.

The traditional application of program synthesis has been in synthesizing tricky programs such as bitvector algorithms to help software developers or algorithm designers. After an initial discussion of this traditional application, we discuss some recent applications of program synthesis techniques to helping end-users with little or no programming background. In particular, we discuss techniques for automating a variety of simple repetitive tasks in spreadsheets using examples.

We then discuss a rather surprising application of synthesis techniques to computer-aided Education including tasks such as problem synthesis, solution synthesis, and feedback synthesis. We illustrate these tasks by means of applications to a variety of subject domains ranging from arithmetic, algebra, geometry, programming, logic, and automata theory.