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...l of rapid prototyping tool support [21]. Studies of rapid prototyping have shown that programmers often build prototypes through an iterative process of adding features by using source code examples =-=[5]-=-, [18]. This iterative process is known as opportunistic programming [6]. Our approach builds on opportunistic programming by allowing programmers to locate source code relevant to several features. I...

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...o systems that are brittle, contain numerous bugs, have poor performance, cannot be easily reused or shared, and lead to a proliferation of idiosyncratic solutions to similar problems within a domain =-=[5]-=-. To date, most of the research in end-user software engineering has focused on enduser programming, where novel forms of programming languages have been developed for enhanced usability within a doma...

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...describes this as “opportunistic programming” where programmers perform web searches for “just-in-time learning by doing” or “web auto-completions” when they do not recall the name of an API function =-=[13]-=-. A study of professional developers working with Alice concluded that interaction-oriented programmers need graphical copy-and-paste and histories for each graphical object to enable this type of imi...

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...ams in code repositories. Some repositories exist exclusively for end-user environments (e.g., CoScripter [9]). In many domains, endusers attempt to learn from or reuse code from these code resources =-=[2,3,13]-=-. To effectively use examples from these resources, users must be able to select the code in an example that relates to their interests [4]. Research suggests non-programmers struggle to select the re...

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...b into useful materials for consumers of any experience level should demand the attention of software engineers. End-user programmers are increasingly relying on source code examples found on the web =-=[11, 14, 26]-=-. Unfortunately, the majority of these code examples may be Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that cop...

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...room, distance-education, and on-the-job settings. RELATED WORK When novices struggle with learning an API, they usually try to cope by looking for code examples that show how to properly use the API =-=[4,5]-=-. The approach is favored particularly in the frequent case where API documentation is incomprehensible, incomplete, or outright missing [17]. A succession of increasingly powerful tools help to augme...

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...ormance or deadlock is even harder to support on script code. This often leads to technically-nave end users resorting to opportunistic programming and copy-paste, wherein they make frequent mistakes =-=[2]-=-. In either case, creating compositions is difficult for end users because of: - Complexity due to low-level details: Existing languages and tools require end users to have knowledge of a myriad of lo...

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...I users is that the Web makes learning how to use an API easier and faster since it contains several code examples. Although previous studies have made use of the API documentation [5, 17] or the Web =-=[2, 16]-=- as learning resources, no study, to our knowledge, has investigated this intuition. We investigated this intuition by hypothesizing that the participants with access to the Web would demonstrate an a...

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...elp perform many different programming tasks, including learning new programming concepts, reminding themselves of syntactic programming language details and clarifying error messages, amongst others =-=[1]-=-. Despite the prominence of web search and exploration in the workday of many software developers, the tools of software development and web browsing remain disconnected from each other. In practice, ...