Example Overflow: Using social media for code recommendation

Abstract

Modern Q&A websites, such as Stack Overflow, use social media to provide concise answers, and offer rich technical context with quality assessment capabilities. Although some of the answers may include executable code snippets, they are entangled in free text and are not easily extracted. Q&A websites are not designed for such direct code reuse. We present Example Overflow, a code search and recommendation tool which brings together social media and code recommendation systems. Example Overflow enables crowd-sourced software development by utilizing both textual and social information, which accompany source code on the Web. Its browsing mechanism minimizes the context switch associated with other code search tools. In this paper we describe the development of the tool, provide preliminary evaluation, and discuss its contribution to an example centric programming paradigm.