
arXiv: 2108.05198
In today's software world with its cornucopia of reusable software libraries, when a programmer is faced with a programming task that they suspect can be completed through the use of a library, they often look for code examples using a search engine and then manually adapt found examples to their specific context of use. We put forward a vision based on a new breed of developer tools that have the potential to largely automate this process. The key idea is to adapt code autocompletion tools such that they take into account not only the developer's already-written code but also the intent of the task the developer is trying to achieve next, formulated in plain natural language. We call this practice of enriching the code with natural language intent to facilitate its completion natural language-guided programming. To show that this idea is feasible we design, implement and benchmark a tool that solves this problem in the context of a specific domain (data science) and a specific programming language (Python). Central to the tool is the use of language models trained on a large corpus of documented code. Our initial experiments confirm the feasibility of the idea but also make it clear that we have only scratched the surface of what may become possible in the future. We end the paper with a comprehensive research agenda to stimulate additional research in the budding area of natural language-guided programming.
FOS: Computer and information sciences, Technology, Computer Science - Machine Learning, Science & Technology, Computer Science - Programming Languages, Natural language processing, example-centric programming, Software Engineering, code completion, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Machine Learning (cs.LG), Software Engineering (cs.SE), Computer Science - Software Engineering, Computer Science, Theory & Methods, natural language-guided programming, Computer Science, code prediction, Programming Languages (cs.PL)
FOS: Computer and information sciences, Technology, Computer Science - Machine Learning, Science & Technology, Computer Science - Programming Languages, Natural language processing, example-centric programming, Software Engineering, code completion, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Machine Learning (cs.LG), Software Engineering (cs.SE), Computer Science - Software Engineering, Computer Science, Theory & Methods, natural language-guided programming, Computer Science, code prediction, Programming Languages (cs.PL)
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