[pl-seminar] [PL Seminar] Today's Talk

[Qinheping HU <qhu28@xxxxxxxx>]

Synthesizing Command Repairs From Examples [3]
Monday, December 12, 2016 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
4310CS
Michael Vaughn
Command-line tools are confusing and hard to use for novice programmers due
to their cryptic error messages and lack of documentation. Novice users often
resort to online help-forums for finding corrections to their buggy commands,
but have a hard time in searching precisely for posts that are relevant to
their problem and then applying the suggested solutions to their buggy
command.

We present a tool, NoFAQ, that uses a set of rules to suggest possible fixes
when users write buggy commands that trigger commonly occurring errors. The
rules are expressed in a language called FixIt and each rule pattern-matches
against the user's buggy command and the corresponding error message, and
uses these inputs to produce a possible fixed command. We demonstrate a
polynomial-time algorithm for incorporating new examples into existing FixIt
rules, without requiring users to manually encode rules, as in previous
command line repair solutions. We will then discuss how NoFAQ and FixIt are
used to construct a web application that crowdsources command repairs from
thousands of users.