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

开发人员的生产力取决于可用编程语言的质量：它们是否充分地支持测试，帮助定位和修复错误，或者对软件的维护做出贡献，软件的维护通常在其创建者的帮助下幸存下来。如果一种编程语言不支持这些常规的开发任务，那么开发人员将被迫求助于劳动密集型和无效的解决方案。这个项目的目标是开发一种科学的工具，用于检查编程语言在不同工作环境中对开发人员的支持程度。该项目的新颖之处在于工具本身：一种构建自动化、大规模模拟的方法，可以验证开发人员如何从一种语言中受益以完成工作的假设。该项目的结果将影响：(i)语言设计者和研究人员：该方法为评估他们的产品提供了手段；（ii）教师：评估产生具体的场景和策略，以展示语言特性或工具的实际价值。虽然模拟在计算机科学中有着悠久的历史，但该项目的方法使它们在编程语言中有了新的用途。在项目的设置中，每个模拟的核心是理性程序员，这是开发人员如何在工作环境中对来自语言实现的信息作出反应的算法抽象。换句话说，理性的程序员体现了开发人员在朝着目标工作时可以采用的策略。当理性程序员对大量场景的模拟未能达到开发人员的目标时，它就使关于开发人员策略的假设无效。它向设计者和研究者指出了语言中存在问题的一面。当它成功时，它告诉教师如何教学生有效地使用语言的这一部分。这个项目旨在通过在三种不同的环境中进行三个主要的调查来测试理性程序员方法的可行性：测试、性能分析和语言表达性。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识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.