If you’ve seen my previous 3 posts, you know what this one is going to cover… After seeing ChatGPT solve the clone detection problem, generate a tokenizer in Python, and perform tokenization from a few examples and informal explanations, this morning I wanted to check if it was capable of generating an entire grammar for […]

Yesterday, I had a conversation with ChatGPT where it helped me write a completely functional tokenizer in Python for the Lox programming language. That conversation was mind blowing enough. And it got me thinking: could I teach it to tokenize Lox programs bypassing coding altogether? After all, we’re dealing with a massive neural network that […]

This morning I decided to test how good ChatGPT is at generating a non-trivial piece of code. I want to write a complete interpreter along the lines of Robert Nystrom’s excellent book Crafting Interpreters. This morning I focused on the tokenizer part only. The tokenizer must be able to recognize several kinds of tokens such […]

I have been playing with ChatGPT, a little bit every morning, close to the things I know best. I’ve had incredible exchanges with it. I’m going to paste the latest conversation I had. I’ll make some comments after. lopes@uci.edu>> Tell me about types of source code clones There are several types of source code clones, […]

Big data is everywhere. Not surprisingly, it has come to our neck of the woods, too: research in software engineering, programming languages, and computer science in general. I’ve done a fair amount of work with it, and I suspect that will not stop. But do we really need big data? When is “big” really necessary […]

Learning how to write performant code is hard. Here are a few simple laws that I hope will convey the core of the matter. I’m calling them…

I’ve been relatively low key about something that I’m very excited about, so, after several months of planning, and a first, somewhat quiet, submission deadline, it’s time to release my enthusiasm. A group of us have started a new conference called <Programming>  associated with a new open-access journal called The Art, Science and Engineering of Programming. Here […]

This post comes from an email conversation going on related to programming languages vs. libraries. The story goes that these days, the major productivity gains come not from new languages but from the existence of libraries that already do almost everything for you. That is unquestionable. These days people don’t choose programming languages as much […]

After failing to find good papers about distributed systems testing for many months, yesterday I asked a question in Twitter: Twitter friends: what papers or frameworks do you recommend regarding distributed systems regression or integration testing techniques? — Crista Lopes (@cristalopes) January 22, 2016 This got many retweets and some interesting replies, so I’m going to summarize them […]

See my post at the IEEE Software Blog.