[This page is a draft]
Goal
1) Create a platform to enable language designers and the community to validate new extensions to Java.
2) Encourage and facilitate empirical research of features in Java.
Abstract
Empirical studies are critical to understand how programming language features are used in practice. They provide answers to questions that help programming languages to evolve.
However, conducting such studies can be difficult and time consuming as they require writing complex static analysis and reporting tools.
We describe a new platform that automates the frequency analysis of language features in Java. It comprises a corpus of open-source software, a query language to specify variant parsers and typecheckers, as well as an automated reporting tool.
Relevant Literature
[1] Goetz, B. Language designer's notebook: Quantitative language design. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-ldn1/.
[2] Parnin, C., Bird, C., and Murphy-Hill, E. Java Generics Adoption: How New Features are Introduced, Championed, or Ignored. In Proceedings of the 8th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
[3] Tempero, E., Anslow, C., Dietrich, J., Han, T., Li, J., Lumpe, M., Melton, H., and Noble, J. Qualitas corpus: A curated collection of java code for empirical studies. In 2010 Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference