252 papers · page 5 of 13
Lines-of-code metrics (loc) are commonly reported in Programming Languages (PL), Software Engineering (SE), and Systems papers. This convention has several different, often contradictory, goals, including demonstrating the `hardness' of a problem, and demonstrating the `easiness'…
Read-eval-print-loops (REPLs) allow programmers to test out snippets of code, explore APIs, or even incrementally construct code, and get immediate feedback on their actions. However, even though many languages provide a REPL, the relation between the language as is and what is a…
Are we really writing software? What do software writers have in common with other professional writers? What can we software developers learn from professional writers? This paper proposes a reflection on such topics using as a reference the book “Six Memos for the Next Millenn…
As the impact of vulnerabilities increases in practice, it is imperative for programming languages to include security as a first-class design consideration. While a number of security-related language features have been proposed to address this need, in many cases, we do not kno…
Programmers are told "depend on interfaces, not implementations." But, given a program, is it possible even to assess objectively whether such advice has been followed? Programmers frequently talk in ways like this about dependence, but the very term, like many used in software …
The long-standing aspiration for software reuse has made astonishing strides in the past few years. Many modern software development ecosystems now come with rich sets of publicly-available components contributed by the community. Downstream developers can leverage these upstream…
Customizing software should be as easy as using it. Unfortunately, most customization methods require users to abruptly shift from using a graphical interface to writing scripts in a programming language. We introduce data-driven customization, a new way for end users to extend …
Programming languages researchers make a variety of different kinds of claims about the design of languages and related tools and calculi. Each type of claim requires different kinds of reasons and evidence to justify. Claims regarding the aesthetics or elegance of a design, or i…
Our community has explored various approaches to improve the programming experience. Although many of them, such as Example-Based Live Programming (ELP), have shown to be effective, they are still not widespread in conventional programming environments. A reason for that is the e…
The paper describes and critiques the certification of U.S. aviation software. Flight-critical software certification and regulation need external academic review and intervention. Industry is driven to generate profits over prioritizing public safety concerns and has failed to d…
As the interactive computational notebook becomes a more prominent code development medium, we examine advantages and disadvantages of this particular source code format. We specify the structure of a coding notebook layout. We describe complexities in notebook programming; some …
An analogy is an identification of structural similarities and correspondences between two objects. Computational models of analogy making have been studied extensively in the field of cognitive science to better understand high-level human cognition. For instance, Melanie Mitche…
Despite being a very old discipline, pointer analysis still attracts several research papers every year in premier programming language venues. While a major goal of contemporary pointer analysis research is to improve its efficiency without sacrificing precision, we also see wor…
Major simultaneous disruptions are currently under way in both hardware and software. In hardware, ``extreme heterogeneity'' has become critical to sustaining cost and performance improvements after Moore's Law, but poses productivity and portability challenges for developers. In…
Debugging distributed systems is hard. Most of the techniques that have been developed for debugging such systems use either extensive model checking, or postmortem analysis of logs and traces. Interactive debugging is typically a tool that is only effective in single threaded an…
The field of big code relies on mining large corpora of code to perform some learning task towards creating better tools for software engineers. A significant threat to this approach was recently identified by Lopes et al. (2017) who found a large amount of near-duplicate code on…
In his essay, Designed as Designer, Richard Gabriel suggests that artifacts are agents of their own design. Building on Gabriel’s position, this essay makes three observations (1) Code “speaks” to the programmer through code smells, and it talks about the shape it wants to take b…
Anglo-American law enables property owners to split up rights among multiple entities by breaking their ownership apart into future interests that may evolve over time. The conveyances that owners use to transfer and subdivide property rights follow rigid syntactic conventions an…
Software applications have grown increasingly complex to deliver the features desired by users. Software modularity has been used as a way to mitigate the costs of developing such complex software. Active learning-based program inference provides an elegant framework that exploit…
Effect systems are used to statically reason about the effects an expression may have when evaluated. In the literature, such effects include various behaviours as diverse as memory accesses and exception throwing. Here we present CallƐ, an object-oriented language that takes a f…