Software Coding Example

A Software Coding Example is a software fragment that is an example.

• Context:
  • It can be associated to a Software Coding Question.
  • It can be the output of a Software Coding QA Task.
  • It can be an Imperative Programming Example, a Functional Programming Example, Object Oriented Programming Example, ...
  • It can illustrate a Programming Concept.
  • It can illustrate a Syntactic Nuance.
  • It can range from being a Pseudo Code to being a Programming Language Statements.
  • It can range from being
    • a Data Reading Coding Sample Fragment,
    • a Data Structure Definition Coding Sample Fragment,
    • a Control-Flow Coding Sample Fragment,
    • a Data Transformation Coding Sample Fragment,
    • a Data Outputting Coding Sample Fragment,
    • a Predictive Modeling Coding Sample Fragment,
    • …
• Example(s):
  • Perl Coding Example, SQL Coding Example, R Coding Example, Scala Coding Example, Python Coding Example, Java Coding Example, Prolog Coding Example, ...
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Software Test.
  • a Writing Style Example.
• See: Data Structure, Software Program.

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References

2018

• (Horton & Parnin, 2018) ⇒ Eric Horton, and Chris Parnin. (2018). “Gistable: Evaluating the Executability of Python Code Snippets on GitHub.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.04919
  • ABSTRACT: Software developers create and share code online to demonstrate programming language concepts and programming tasks. Code snippets can be a useful way to explain and demonstrate a programming concept, but may not always be directly executable. A code snippet can contain parse errors, or fail to execute if the environment contains unmet dependencies.

    This paper presents an empirical analysis of the executable status of Python code snippets shared through the GitHub gist system, and the ability of developers familiar with software configuration to correctly configure and run them. We find that 75.6% of gists require non-trivial configuration to overcome missing dependencies, configuration files, reliance on a specific operating system, or some other environment configuration. Our study also suggests the natural assumption developers make about resource names when resolving configuration errors is correct less than half the time.

    We also present Gistable, a database and extensible framework built on GitHub's gist system, which provides executable code snippets to enable reproducible studies in software engineering. Gistable contains 10,259 code snippets, approximately 5,000 with a Dockerfile to configure and execute them without import error. Gistable is publicly available at this https URL

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