Keyword programming in Java

Abstract

Keyword programming is a novel technique for reducing the need to remember details of programming language syntax and APIs, by translating a small number of keywords provided by the user into a valid expression. Prior work has demonstrated the feasibility and merit of this approach in limited domains. This paper presents a new algorithm that scales to the much larger domain of general-purpose Java programming. We tested the algorithm by extracting keywords from method calls in open source projects, and found that it could accurately reconstruct over 90% of the original expressions. We also conducted a study using keywords generated by users, whose results suggest that users can obtain correct Java code using keyword queries as accurately as they can write the correct Java code themselves. Copyright 2007 ACM.