On the fly synthesis of edit suggestions
When working with a document, users often perform context-specific repetitive edits – changes to the document that are similar but specific to the contexts at their locations. Programming by demonstration/examples (PBD/PBE) systems automate these tasks by learning programs to perform the repetitive...
Saved in:
| Published in: | Proceedings of ACM on programming languages Vol. 3; no. OOPSLA; pp. 1 - 29 |
|---|---|
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , |
| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
01.10.2019
|
| ISSN: | 2475-1421, 2475-1421 |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: | When working with a document, users often perform context-specific repetitive edits – changes to the document that are similar but specific to the contexts at their locations. Programming by demonstration/examples (PBD/PBE) systems automate these tasks by learning programs to perform the repetitive edits from demonstration or examples. However, PBD/PBE systems are not widely adopted, mainly because they require modal UIs – users must enter a special mode to give the demonstration/examples. This paper presents Blue-Pencil, a modeless system for synthesizing edit suggestions on the fly. Blue-Pencil observes users as they make changes to the document, silently identifies repetitive changes, and automatically suggests transformations that can apply at other locations. Blue-Pencil is parameterized – it allows the ”plug-and-play” of different PBE engines to support different document types and different kinds of transformations. We demonstrate this parameterization by instantiating Blue-Pencil to several domains – C# and SQL code, markdown documents, and spreadsheets – using various existing PBE engines. Our evaluation on 37 code editing sessions shows that Blue-Pencil synthesized edit suggestions with a precision of 0.89 and a recall of 1.0, and took 199 ms to return suggestions on average. Finally, we report on several improvements based on feedback gleaned from a field study with professional programmers to investigate the use of Blue-Pencil during long code editing sessions. Blue-Pencil has been integrated with Visual Studio IntelliCode to power the IntelliCode refactorings feature. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 2475-1421 2475-1421 |
| DOI: | 10.1145/3360569 |