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：它们是否充分支持测试，帮助定位和修复错误，或者有助于软件的维护，这些软件通常在其创建者中幸存下来。 如果一种编程语言不支持这些常规的开发任务，开发人员就不得不求助于劳动密集型和无效的解决方法。 该项目的目标是开发一种科学工具，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。该项目的新奇在于工具本身：一种用于构建自动化、大规模模拟的方法，该方法验证了关于开发人员如何从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：该方法提供了评估其产品的手段;（ii）教师：评估产生了具体的场景和策略，用于展示语言功能或工具的价值。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rational programmer，一个算法抽象，描述了开发人员如何在工作环境中对语言实现的信息做出反应。换句话说，一个理性的程序员体现了一种策略，开发人员可以在朝着目标工作的上下文中使用这种策略。当一个rational程序员在大量场景上的模拟未能达到开发者的目标时，它就使得关于开发者策略的假设无效。它指出了设计者和研究人员对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。 该项目旨在通过在测试、性能分析和语言表现力三个不同的背景下进行三项主要调查来测试rational-programmer方法的可行性。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而被认为值得支持。

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.