A longitudinal study of programmers' backtracking

Yoon, Young Seok; Myers, Brad A.

doi:10.1109/vlhcc.2014.6883030

Cited by 27 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees at POPL and TFP 2016 for useful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper; Ed Morehouse and Carlo Angiuli for counsel on mechanization and Barendrecht's Convention; Vincent Zeng for pro bono artistic services; and YoungSeok Yoon for reanalyzing the data from [67]. This work was partially funded through a gift from Mozilla; the NSF grant #CCF-1619282, 1553741 and 1439957; by AFRL and DARPA under agreement #FA8750-16-2-0042; and by NSA lablet contract #H98230-14-C-0140.…”

Section: Acknowledgmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This complicates the design of program editors and other interactive programming tools. In a dataset gathered by Yoon and Myers consisting of 1460 hours of Eclipse edit logs [67], 44.2% of edit states were syntactically malformed. Some additional percentage of edit states were well-formed but ill-typed (the dataset was not complete enough to determine the exact percentage.)…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Hazelnut: a bidirectionally typed structure editor calculus

Omar

Voysey

Hilton

et al. 2017

Proceedings of the 44th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

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Structure editors allow programmers to edit the tree structure of a program directly. This can have cognitive benefits, particularly for novice and end-user programmers. It also simplifies matters for tool designers, because they do not need to contend with malformed program text.This paper introduces Hazelnut, a structure editor based on a small bidirectionally typed lambda calculus extended with holes and a cursor. Hazelnut goes one step beyond syntactic well-formedness: its edit actions operate over statically meaningful incomplete terms. Naïvely, this would force the programmer to construct terms in a rigid "outside-in" manner. To avoid this problem, the action semantics automatically places terms assigned a type that is inconsistent with the expected type inside a hole. This meaningfully defers the type consistency check until the term inside the hole is finished.Hazelnut is not intended as an end-user tool itself. Instead, it serves as a foundational account of typed structure editing.To that end, we describe how Hazelnut's rich metatheory, which we have mechanized using the Agda proof assistant, serves as a guide when we extend the calculus to include binary sum types. We also discuss various interpretations of holes, and in so doing reveal connections with gradual typing and contextual modal type theory, the Curry-Howard interpretation of contextual modal logic. Finally, we discuss how Hazelnut's semantics lends itself to implementation as an event-based functional reactive program. Our simple reference implementation is written using js_of_ocaml.

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Section: Acknowledgmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hazelnut: a bidirectionally typed structure editor calculus

Omar

Voysey

Hilton

et al. 2017

Proceedings of the 44th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Both approaches are fraught with challenges in trying to automatically determine how the affected code may impact other choices made in the implementation. Existing research on how programmers backtrack (e.g., [11]) may provide a basis on which to start this research direction. It will also be challenging to determine how to interact with the developer in altering the program to different points in time where the semantics may or may not affected by different choices.…”

Section: Defining and Applying Alternativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speculative reprogramming

Palyart

Murphy

Murphy-Hill

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

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Although software development involves making numerous decisions amongst alternatives, the design and implementation choices made typically become invisible; what a developer sees in the project's artifacts are the end result of all of the decisions. What if, instead, all of the choices made were tracked and it was easy for a developer to revisit a point where a decision was made and choose another alternative? What if the development environment could detect and suggest alternative choices? What if it was easy and low-cost to try another path? We explore the idea of speculative reprogramming that could support a what-if environment for the programming stages of software development.

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“…Throughout the process of addressing these errors, which can sometimes span many days, the program text remains formally meaningless. About 40% of edits performed by Java programmers using Eclipse left the program text malformed [Omar et al 2017a] and some additional number, which could not be determined from the data gathered by Yoon and Myers [2014], were well-formed but ill-typed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Live functional programming with typed holes

Omar

Voysey

Chugh

et al. 2019

Proc. ACM Program. Lang.

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Live programming environments aim to provide programmers (and sometimes audiences) with continuous feedback about a program's dynamic behavior as it is being edited. The problem is that programming languages typically assign dynamic meaning only to programs that are complete, i.e. syntactically well-formed and free of type errors. Consequently, live feedback presented to the programmer exhibits temporal or perceptive gaps. This paper confronts this "gap problem" from type-theoretic first principles by developing a dynamic semantics for incomplete functional programs, starting from the static semantics for incomplete functional programs developed in recent work on Hazelnut. We model incomplete functional programs as expressions with holes, with empty holes standing for missing expressions or types, and non-empty holes operating as membranes around static and dynamic type inconsistencies. Rather than aborting when evaluation encounters any of these holes as in some existing systems, evaluation proceeds around holes, tracking the closure around each hole instance as it flows through the remainder of the program. Editor services can use the information in these hole closures to help the programmer develop and confirm their mental model of the behavior of the complete portions of the program as they decide how to fill the remaining holes. Hole closures also enable a fill-and-resume operation that avoids the need to restart evaluation after edits that amount to hole filling. Formally, the semantics borrows machinery from both gradual type theory (which supplies the basis for handling unfilled type holes) and contextual modal type theory (which supplies a logical basis for hole closures), combining these and developing additional machinery necessary to continue evaluation past holes while maintaining type safety. We have mechanized the metatheory of the core calculus, called Hazelnut Live, using the Agda proof assistant.We have also implemented these ideas into the Hazel programming environment. The implementation inserts holes automatically, following the Hazelnut edit action calculus, to guarantee that every editor state has some (possibly incomplete) type. Taken together with this paper's type safety property, the result is a proof-of-concept live programming environment where rich dynamic feedback is truly available without gaps, i.e. for every reachable editor state.

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A longitudinal study of programmers' backtracking

Cited by 27 publications

References 12 publications

Hazelnut: a bidirectionally typed structure editor calculus

Hazelnut: a bidirectionally typed structure editor calculus

Speculative reprogramming

Live functional programming with typed holes

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