CAREER: The Rational Programmer, An Investigative Method for Programming Language Pragmatics

开发人员的生产率取决于可用编程语言的质量：它们是否充分支持测试、帮助定位和修复错误，还是有助于软件的维护，而软件的创建者往往会幸存下来。如果编程语言不支持这些常规开发任务，开发人员将被迫求助于劳动密集型和无效的变通方法。这个项目的目标是开发一种科学工具，用于测试编程语言在不同工作环境中对开发人员的支持程度。该项目的新奇之处在于工具本身：一种构建自动化的大规模模拟的方法，它验证了开发人员如何从一种语言中受益来完成一项工作的假设。该项目的结果将影响：(I)语言设计师和研究人员：该方法为评估他们的产品提供了手段；(Ii)教师：评估产生了具体的场景和策略，以展示语言功能或工具的实际价值。虽然模拟在计算机科学中有很长的历史，但该项目的方法使它们在编程语言中有了新的用途。在项目环境中，每个模拟的核心是Rational程序员，这是开发人员如何在工作环境中对来自语言实现的信息做出反应的算法抽象。换句话说，Rational程序员体现了一种策略，开发人员可以在实现目标的上下文中使用该策略。当Rational程序员在大量场景上的模拟不能达到开发人员的目标时，它使关于开发人员策略的假设无效。它将设计师和研究人员引向了语言的一个有问题的方面。当它成功时，它告诉教师如何教学生有效地使用这部分语言。该项目旨在通过在三个不同的上下文中进行三个主要调查来测试Rational程序员方法的可行性：测试、性能分析和语言表达。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The productivity of developers depends on the quality of the available programming languages: whether they support testing adequately, help with locating and fixing mistakes, or contribute to the maintenance of software, which often survives its creators. If a programming language does not support these routine development tasks, the developer is forced to resort to labor-intensive and ineffective workarounds. The goal of this project is to develop a scientific instrument for examining how well a programming language supports developers in different work contexts. The project's novelty is the instrument itself: a method for constructing automated, large-scale simulations that (in)validate hypotheses about how a developer can benefit from a language to complete a work. The project's results are going to impact: (i) language designers and researchers: the method provides the means for evaluating their products; (ii) instructors: the evaluations yield concrete scenarios and strategies for demonstrating the value of a language feature or tool in action.While simulations have a long history in computer science, the project's method puts them to new use in programming languages. In the project's setting, the heart of each simulation is the rational programmer, an algorithmic abstraction of how a developer reacts to information from language implementations in the context of a work situation. In other words, a rational programmer embodies a strategy that a developer can employ while working in a context towards a goal. When the simulation of a rational programmer on a large number of scenarios fails to reach the developer's goal, it invalidates a hypothesis about the developer strategy. It points designers and researchers to a problematic aspect of the language. When it succeeds, it informs instructors how to teach students the effective use of this part of the language. This project aims to put to test the feasibility of the rational-programmer method by conducting three major investigations in three different contexts: testing, performance profiling, and language expressiveness.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.