Reusing code by reasoning about its purpose

When programmers face unfamiliar or challenging tasks, code written by others could give them inspiration or reusable pieces. But how can they find code appropriate for their goals? This thesis describes a programming interface, called Zones, that connects code with descriptions of purpose, encouraging annotation, sharing, and reuse of code. The backend, called ProcedureSpace, reasons jointly over both the words that people used to describe code fragments and syntactic features derived from static analysis of that code to enable searching for code given purpose descriptions or vice versa. It uses a technique called Bridge Blending to do joint inference across data of many types, including using domain-specific and commonsense background knowledge to help understand different ways of describing goals. Since Zones uses the same interface for searching as for annotating, users can leave searches around as annotations, even if the search fails, which helps the system learn from user interaction. This thesis describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of the Zones and ProcedureSpace system, showing that reasoning jointly over natural language and programming language helps programmers reuse code.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Arnold, Kenneth Charles

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Henry Lieberman.

• Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/57785

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/57785