252 papers · page 4 of 13
Software developers frequently refactor code. Often, a single logical refactoring change involves changing multiple related components in a source base such as renaming each occurrence of a variable or function. While many code editors can perform such common and generic refactor…
Portals is a serverless, distributed programming model that blends the exactly-once processing guarantees of stateful dataflow streaming frameworks with the message-driven compositionality of actor frameworks. Decentralized applications in Portals can be built dynamically, scale …
Debugging is an essential part of software development. Numerous tools and techniques to improve debugging have been proposed in research or developed in the industry. However, only a few of those see widespread use, and debugging only rarely is a primary teaching subject. To pr…
Computer programming typically requires people to describe operations in a formally specified textual language. Unfortunately, working with syntax is a significant cognitive load, making programming difficult for beginners and time-consuming for professional developers. In respon…
We must retain liveness and exploratory practices within the programming systems that make us feel most productive. However, the temptation to just reuse black boxes through limited interfaces is pervasive. We expect time savings and better performance at the cost of poor repaira…
What is a conference for? What are its design considerations? What are the trade-offs between virtual and terrestrial meetings? Within these larger frame questions, this essay looks only at the following argument: The first critical step in research is the hypothesis—the novel i…
Object-oriented programming has been around for more than 50 years and is now the most dominant style of programming. In recent years there has been an increasing criticism of object-oriented programming. Some people argue that the mainstream object-oriented languages do not capt…
Programming is usually based on an inconvenient separation between an implementation level and a user level. Self-sustaining systems expose their implementation at their user level so that they can be modified and improved from within. However, the few examples that exist are tig…
Configurable software makes up most of the software in use today. Configurability, i.e., the ability of software to be customized without additional programming, is pervasive, and due to the criticality of problems caused by misconfiguration, it has been an active topic researche…
Our thinking about software is shaped by basic assumptions and metaphors that we rarely question. Computer science has the term science in its very name; we think of programming languages as formal mathematical objects and we hope to make better software by treating it as an engi…
Video-based sensing from aerial drones, especially small multirotor drones, can provide rich data for numerous applications, including traffic analysis (computing traffic flow volumes), precision agriculture (periodically evaluating plant health), and wildlife population manageme…
Asynchronous programming is having its “renaissance” moment in recent years. Created in the 1980s, it was in use for quite some time, but with the advent of multi-core processors, it has been sidestepped by multi-threaded programming, which was (for a long time) the de facto stan…
Dynamic languages like Erlang, Clojure, JavaScript, and E adopted data-race freedom by design. To enforce data-race freedom, these languages either deep copy objects during actor (thread) communication or proxy back to their owning thread. We present Dala, a simple programming mo…
Software testing is hard, and a testing problem is composed of many sub-problems with different, often conflicting, solutions. Like many real-world problems, it admits no single optimal solution, but requires dexterity, and the opportunistic combination of many partial solutions.…
Computer science and software engineering students are typically taught to evaluate resource use in terms of time complexity. Developers use asymptotic analysis to compare algorithms by calculating how time grows as a function of input size. However, two factors have limited trad…
In today’s software world with its cornucopia of reusable software libraries, when a programmer is faced with a programming task that they suspect can be completed through the use of a library, they often look for code examples using a search engine and then manually adapt found …
Over recent years, self-adaptation has become a concern for many software systems that have to operate in complex and changing environments. At the core of self-adaptation, there is a feedback loop and associated trade-off reasoning to decide on the best course of action. However…
Surrogates, models that mimic the behavior of programs, form the basis of a variety of development workflows. We study three surrogate-based design patterns, evaluating each in case studies on a large-scale CPU simulator.
The whole activity of programming can be thought of as a process of time reusability. This essay considers how computing education can transform these errors into shared learning journeys by refining the relationship between programmer and user. It is also an interpretation of Ra…
THE purpose of the following paper is to consider whether there is a fundamental division of the [data] with which [programming] is concerned into two classes, [objects] and [values], or whether there is any method of overcoming this dualism. My own opinion is that the dualism is…