Developers increasingly take to the Internet for code snippets to integrate into their programs. To save developers the time required to switch from their development environments to a web browser in the quest for a suitable code snippet, we introduce NLP2Code, a content assist for code snippets. Unlike related tools, NLP2Code integrates directly into the source code editor and provides developers with a content assist feature to close the vocabulary gap between developers' needs and code snippet meta data. Our preliminary evaluation of NLP2Code shows that the majority of invocations lead to code snippets rated as helpful by users and that the tool is able to support a wide range of tasks.
@cite_0: In programming practice, developers often need sample code in order to learn how to solve a programming-related problem. For example, how to reuse an Application Programming Interface (API) of a large-scale software library and how to implement a certain functionality. We believe that previously written code can help developers understand how others addressed the similar problems and can help them write new programs. We develop a tool called Bing Developer Assistant (BDA), which improves developer productivity by recommending sample code mined from public software repositories (such as GitHub) and web pages (such as Stack Overflow). BDA can automatically mine code snippets that implement an API or answer a code search query. It has been implemented as a free-downloadable extension of Microsoft Visual Studio and has received more than 670K downloads since its initial release in December 2014. BDA is publicly available at: http: aka.ms devassistant.
@cite_2: Modern programming frameworks come with large libraries, with diverse applications such as for matching regular expressions, parsing XML files and sending email. Programmers often use search engines such as Google and Bing to learn about existing APIs. In this paper, we describe SWIM, a tool which suggests code snippets given API-related natural language queries such as "generate md5 hash code". The query does not need to contain framework-specific trivia such as the type names or methods of interest. We translate user queries into the APIs of interest using clickthrough data from the Bing search engine. Then, based on patterns learned from open-source code repositories, we synthesize idiomatic code describing the use of these APIs. We introduce structured call sequences to capture API-usage patterns. Structured call sequences are a generalized form of method call sequences, with if-branches and while-loops to represent conditional and repeated API usage patterns, and are simple to extract and amenable to synthesis. We evaluated swim with 30 common C# API-related queries received by Bing. For 70 of the queries, the first suggested snippet was a relevant solution, and a relevant solution was present in the top 10 results for all benchmarked queries. The online portion of the workflow is also very responsive, at an average of 1.5 seconds per snippet.
@cite_8: Developers often wonder how to implement a certain functionality (e.g., how to parse XML files) using APIs. Obtaining an API usage sequence based on an API-related natural language query is very helpful in this regard. Given a query, existing approaches utilize information retrieval models to search for matching API sequences. These approaches treat queries and APIs as bag-of-words (i.e., keyword matching or word-to-word alignment) and lack a deep understanding of the semantics of the query. We propose DeepAPI, a deep learning based approach to generate API usage sequences for a given natural language query. Instead of a bags-of-words assumption, it learns the sequence of words in a query and the sequence of associated APIs. DeepAPI adapts a neural language model named RNN Encoder-Decoder. It encodes a word sequence (user query) into a fixed-length context vector, and generates an API sequence based on the context vector. We also augment the RNN Encoder-Decoder by considering the importance of individual APIs. We empirically evaluate our approach with more than 7 million annotated code snippets collected from GitHub. The results show that our approach generates largely accurate API sequences and outperforms the related approaches.
Similar tools to T2API that also do not provide content assist include the Bing Developer Assistant @cite_0 , @cite_8 , and @cite_2 .