From Query to Usable Code: An Analysis of Stack Overflow Code Snippets

Di Yang, Aftab Hussain, C. Lopes
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引用次数: 96

Abstract

Enriched by natural language texts, Stack Overflow code snippets arean invaluable code-centric knowledge base of small units ofsource code. Besides being useful for software developers, theseannotated snippets can potentially serve as the basis for automatedtools that provide working code solutions to specific natural languagequeries. With the goal of developing automated tools with the Stack Overflowsnippets and surrounding text, this paper investigates the followingquestions: (1) How usable are the Stack Overflow code snippets? and(2) When using text search engines for matching on the naturallanguage questions and answers around the snippets, what percentage ofthe top results contain usable code snippets?A total of 3M code snippets are analyzed across four languages: C\#,Java, JavaScript, and Python. Python and JavaScript proved to be thelanguages for which the most code snippets are usable. Conversely,Java and C\# proved to be the languages with the lowest usabilityrate. Further qualitative analysis on usable Python snippets showsthe characteristics of the answers that solve the original question. Finally,we use Google search to investigate the alignment ofusability and the natural language annotations around code snippets, andexplore how to make snippets in Stack Overflow anadequate base for future automatic program generation.
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从查询到可用代码:堆栈溢出代码片段的分析
通过自然语言文本的丰富,堆栈溢出代码片段提供了以代码为中心的小单元源代码的宝贵知识库。除了对软件开发人员有用之外,这些带注释的代码片段可以潜在地作为自动化工具的基础,为特定的自然语言查询提供工作代码解决方案。为了开发带有堆栈溢出代码片段和周围文本的自动化工具,本文研究了以下问题:(1)堆栈溢出代码片段的可用性如何?(2)当使用文本搜索引擎对自然语言的问题和答案进行匹配时,顶部结果中包含可用代码片段的百分比是多少?总共有3M个代码片段在四种语言中进行分析:c#、Java、JavaScript和Python。Python和JavaScript被证明是可用代码段最多的语言。相反,Java和c#被证明是可用性最低的语言。对可用Python片段的进一步定性分析显示了解决原始问题的答案的特征。最后,我们使用Google搜索来研究可用性和代码片段周围的自然语言注释的一致性,并探索如何使Stack Overflow中的代码片段成为未来自动程序生成的充分基础。
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