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The impacts of many human factors on how people program are poorly understood and present significant challenges for work on improving programmer productivity and effective techniques for teaching and learning programming. Programming error messages are one factor that is particularly problematic, with a documented history of evidence dating back over 50 years. Such messages, commonly called compiler error messages, present difficulties for programmers with diverse demographic backgrounds. It is generally agreed that these messages could be more effective for all users, making this an obvious and high-impact area to target for improving programming outcomes. This report documents the program and the outputs of Dagstuhl Seminar 22052, “The Human Factors Impact of Programming Error Messages”, which explores this problem. In total, 11 on-site participants and 17 remote participants engaged in intensive collaboration during the seminar, including discussing past and current research, identifying gaps, and developing ways to move forward collaboratively to address these challenges.
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Error messages are classifiers: a process to design and evaluate error messages
This paper presents a lightweight process to guide error report authoring. We take the perspective that error reports are really classifiers of program information. They should therefore be subjected to the same measures as other classifiers (e.g., precision and recall). We formalize this perspective as a process for assessing error reports, describe our application of this process to an actual programming language, and present a preliminary study on the utility of the resulting error reports.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1647486
- PAR ID:
- 10067512
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 134 to 147
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3133850.3133862
