research-article

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On the fly synthesis of edit suggestions

Authors:

Anders Miltner,

Arjun Radhakrishna,

Gustavo Soares,

Abhishek UdupaAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 3, Issue OOPSLA

Article No.: 143, Pages 1 - 29

https://doi.org/10.1145/3360569

Published: 10 October 2019 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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Cited By

Matute GNi WBarik TCheung AChasins S(2024)Syntactic Code Search with Sequence-to-Tree Matching: Supporting Syntactic Search with Incomplete Code FragmentsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36564608:PLDI(2051-2072)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656460
Ketkar ARamos DClapp LBarik RRamanathan M(2024)A Lightweight Polyglot Code Transformation LanguageProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36564298:PLDI(1288-1312)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
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Sato SNakamaru T(2024)Multiverse Notebook: Shifting Data Scientists to Time TravelersProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36498388:OOPSLA1(754-783)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2024
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Index Terms

On the fly synthesis of edit suggestions
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Development frameworks and environments
      1. Integrated and visual development environments
    2. Software maintenance tools

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Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages Volume 3, Issue OOPSLA

October 2019

2077 pages

EISSN:2475-1421

DOI:10.1145/3366395

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Copyright © 2019 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 10 October 2019

Published in PACMPL Volume 3, Issue OOPSLA

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Cited By

Matute GNi WBarik TCheung AChasins S(2024)Syntactic Code Search with Sequence-to-Tree Matching: Supporting Syntactic Search with Incomplete Code FragmentsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36564608:PLDI(2051-2072)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656460
Ketkar ARamos DClapp LBarik RRamanathan M(2024)A Lightweight Polyglot Code Transformation LanguageProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36564298:PLDI(1288-1312)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656429
Sato SNakamaru T(2024)Multiverse Notebook: Shifting Data Scientists to Time TravelersProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36498388:OOPSLA1(754-783)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649838
Bairi RSonwane AKanade AC. VIyer AParthasarathy SRajamani SAshok BShet S(2024)CodePlan: Repository-Level Coding using LLMs and PlanningProceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering10.1145/36437571:FSE(675-698)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024
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Dilhara MBellur ABryksin TDig D(2024)Unprecedented Code Change Automation: The Fusion of LLMs and Transformation by ExampleProceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering10.1145/36437551:FSE(631-653)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024
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Gupta PKhare ABajpai YChakraborty SGulwani SKanade ARadhakrishna ASoares GTiwari AChandra SBlincoe KTonella P(2023)Grace: Language Models Meet Code EditsProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616253(1483-1495)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
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