The effects of comments and identifier names on program comprehensibility: an experimental investigation
By A. A. Takang, P. Grubb, R. Macredie. 1996
Subfields: Program Analysis & Verification
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Program Analysis & Verification
- Miltiadis Allamanis
- Charles Sutton
- Uri Alon
- Earl T. Barr
- Marc Brockschmidt
- Baptiste Rozière
- Guillaume Lample
- Marie-Anne Lachaux
Citations in the corpus
- PAL: Program-aided Language Models (2022, background): “Since variable names have an important part in code quality (Gel-lenbeck & Cook, 1991; Takang et al., 1996), meaningful variable names are only expected to ease reasoning for ).”
- DOBF: A Deobfuscation Pre-Training Objective for Programming Languages (2021, background): “Empirical studies show that naming conventions and the use of informative identifier names make code more understandable, easier to maintain and lead to fewer bugs (Takang et al., 1996; Liblit et al., 2006; Butler et al., 2009).”
- Suggesting accurate method and class names (2015, background): “Finding good names for programming language constructs is difficult; poor names make code harder to understand and maintain [29, 50, 30, 7].”
- Learning natural coding conventions (2014, background): “High quality identifier names lie at the heart of software engineering [6, 16, 20, 24, 42, 66, 69, 54]; they drive code readability and comprehension [12, 19, 20, 41, 44, 68].”
- Towards automatically generating summary comments for Java methods (2010, background): “In spite of numerous studies demonstrating the utility of comments for understanding software [30–32], few software projects adequately document the code to reduce future maintenance costs [6,14].”
- Statistical Deobfuscation of Android Applications (2016, background): “Several works have studied the effect of identifier names [36, 33, 12] and have shown that good names have significant impact on one’s ability to understand the source code.”
- Learning to Spot and Refactor Inconsistent Method Names (2019, background): “grams harder to understand and maintain [12]–[18], and may”