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Title: Do Programmers Prefer Predictable Expressions in Code?
Abstract Source code is a form of human communication, albeit one where the information shared between the programmers reading and writing the code is constrained by the requirement that the code executes correctly. Programming languages are more syntactically constrained than natural languages, but they are also very expressive, allowing a great many different ways to express even very simple computations. Still, code written by developers is highly predictable, and many programming tools have taken advantage of this phenomenon, relying on language modelsurprisalas a guiding mechanism. While surprisal has been validated as a measure of cognitive load in natural language, its relation to human cognitive processes in code is still poorly understood. In this paper, we explore the relationship between surprisal and programmer preference at a small granularity—do programmers prefer more predictable expressions in code? Usingmeaning‐preserving transformations, we produce equivalent alternatives to developer‐written code expressions and run a corpus study on Java and Python projects. In general, language models rate the code expressions developerschooseto write as more predictable than these transformed alternatives. Then, we perform two human subject studies asking participants to choose between two equivalent snippets of Java code with different surprisal scores (one original and transformed). We find that programmersdoprefer more predictable variants, and that stronger language models like the transformer align more often and more consistently with these preferences.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2107592
PAR ID:
10245255
Author(s) / Creator(s):
 ;  ;  ;  ;  
Publisher / Repository:
Wiley-Blackwell
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Cognitive Science
Volume:
44
Issue:
12
ISSN:
0364-0213
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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