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Prior work on code comprehension uses different comprehension proxies-for example, Likert-scale ratings or answers to input-output questions about program snippets, usually collected from students, to approximate whether code is…

We present a neural program synthesis approach integrating components which write, execute, and assess code to navigate the search space of possible programs. We equip the search process with an interpreter or a read-eval-print-loop (REPL),…

This paper documents a year-long experiment to "profile" the process of learning a programming language: gathering data to understand what makes a language hard to learn, and using that data to improve the learning process. We added…

Code corpora, as observed in large software systems, are now known to be far more repetitive and predictable than natural language corpora. But why? Does the difference simply arise from the syntactic limitations of programming languages?…

Identifying security issues early is encouraged to reduce the latent negative impacts on software systems. Code review is a widely-used method that allows developers to manually inspect modified code, catching security issues during a…

We introduce Codex, a GPT language model fine-tuned on publicly available code from GitHub, and study its Python code-writing capabilities. A distinct production version of Codex powers GitHub Copilot. On HumanEval, a new evaluation set we…

CPEG is an extended parsing expression grammar with regex-like capture annotation. Two annotations (capture and left-folding) allow a flexible construction of syntax trees from arbitrary parsing patterns. More importantly, CPEG is designed…

A compiler processes the code written in a high level language and produces machine executable code. The compiler writers often face the challenge of keeping the compilation times reasonable. That is because aggressive optimization passes…

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly adopted for programming work. Prior work shows that while LLMs accelerate task completion for professional programmers, beginning programmers struggle to prompt models effectively.…

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) systems play a vital role in assisting people with their daily writing tasks. However, users may sometimes come across a GEC system that initially performs well but fails to correct errors when the inputs…

The relevance of code comprehension in a developer's daily work was recognized more than 40 years ago. Consequently, many experiments were conducted to find out how developers could be supported during code comprehension and which code…

We study the generalization abilities of language models when translating natural language into formal specifications with complex semantics. In particular, we fine-tune language models on three datasets consisting of English sentences and…

Dyslexia is a common learning disorder that primarily impairs an individual's reading and writing abilities. In adults, dyslexia can affect both professional and personal lives, often leading to mental challenges and difficulties acquiring…

Regular expressions are a concise yet expressive language for expressing patterns. For instance, in networked software, they are used for input validation and intrusion detection. Yet some widely deployed regular expression matchers based…

While programming is one of the most broadly applicable skills in modern society, modern machine learning models still cannot code solutions to basic problems. Despite its importance, there has been surprisingly little work on evaluating…

Top-down parsing has received much attention recently. Parsing expression grammars (PEG) allows construction of linear time parsers using packrat algorithm. These techniques however suffer from problem of prefix hiding. We use alternative…

Code generation aims to automatically generate code snippets of specific programming language according to natural language descriptions. The continuous advancements in deep learning, particularly pre-trained models, have empowered the code…

Research Software Engineering (RSEng) is a key success factor in producing high-quality research software, which in turn enables and improves research outcomes. However, as a principal investigator or leader of a research group you may not…

Spreadsheet engineering adapts the lessons of software engineering to spreadsheets, providing eight principles as a framework for organizing spreadsheet programming recommendations. Spreadsheets raise issues inadequately addressed by…

Software product lines have recently been presented as one of the best promising improvements for the efficient software development. Different research works contribute supportive parameters and negotiations regarding the problems of…