On the naturalness of software

—Natural languages like English are rich, complex, and powerful. The highly creative and graceful use of languages like English and Tamil, by masters like Shakespeare and Avvaiyar, can certainly delight and inspire. But in practice, given cognitive constraints and the exigencies of daily life, most human utterances are far simpler and much more repetitive and predictable. In fact, these utterances can be very usefully modeled using modern statistical methods. This fact has led to the phenomenal success of statistical approaches to speech recognition, natural language translation, question-answering, and text mining and comprehension. We begin with the conjecture that most software is also natural, in the sense that it is created by humans at work, with all the attendant constraints and limitations—and thus, like natural language, it is also likely to be repetitive and predictable. We then proceed to ask whether a) code can be usefully modeled by statistical language models and b) s...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Abram Hindle, Earl T. Barr, Zhendong Su, Mark Gabel, Premkumar T. Devanbu
• Keywords: Cognitive Constraints, ICSE 2012, Natural Language Translation, Software Engineering, Statistical Language Models