{"title":"From Query to Usable Code: An Analysis of Stack Overflow Code Snippets","authors":"Di Yang, Aftab Hussain, C. Lopes","doi":"10.1145/2901739.2901767","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":6621,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE/ACM 13th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)","volume":"14 1","pages":"391-401"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2016-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"96","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"2016 IEEE/ACM 13th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2901739.2901767","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
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.