What Makes APIs Hard to Learn? The Answers of Developers

By Martin P. Robillard. 2011

367 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/18a96ee12099327e3794c79f0ddee5620cd123c1

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Science Applications

In Information Systems

Citations in the corpus

Augmenting API Documentation with Insights from Stack Overflow (2016, background): “Some of the most severe obstacles faced by developers learning a new API are related to its documentation [32], in particular because of scarce information about the API’s design, rationale [31], usage scenarios, and code examples [32].”
Synthesizing API usage examples (2012, methodology): “” [11] We present an algorithm that automatically generates API usage examples.”
Deep API learning (2016, background): “6% respondents mentioned that there are obstacles caused by inadequate or absent resources for learning APIs [38].”
Parameter-free probabilistic API mining across GitHub (2015, background): “Learning the application programming interface (API) of an unfamiliar library or software framework can be a significant obstacle for developers [32, 33].”
Parameter-Free Probabilistic API Mining at GitHub Scale (2015, background): “Learning the application programming interface (API) of an unfamiliar library or software framework can be a significant obstacle for developers [28, 29].”
An empirical study of the influence of static type systems on the usability of undocumented software (2012, background): “Works such as [14, 24] provide additional insights about other possible influencing factors for the use of APIs, which might have a larger effect than the type system of the underlying programming language.”
Using an LLM to Help with Code Understanding (2023, background): “Researchers cataloged problems developers face when using documentation [9, 60, 61] and identified types of knowledge developers report to be critical [46, 60, 61, 70], which were taken into account when we designed GILT for our study.”