Journal of Computer Languages最新文献

{"title":"An intelligent low-code platform for building task-oriented LLM-based chatbots","authors":"Ángel Quiles,&nbsp;Esther Guerra,&nbsp;Juan de Lara","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2026.101401","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cola.2026.101401","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Task-oriented chatbots help users complete specific goals such as ordering products. We recently proposed Taskyto, a domain-specific language (DSL) for building LLM-based task-oriented chatbots. Although Taskyto simplifies development, it remains challenging for non-experts due to complex installation, required DSL knowledge, and dedicated infrastructure to run the chatbots.</div><div>To address these limitations, we present <span>Bot-Craft</span>, a low-code platform for creating and deploying Taskyto chatbots, augmented with an intelligent assistant that generates Taskyto code from natural language requests. We report on experiments demonstrating the assistant’s usability, effectiveness, performance, and accuracy in supporting chatbot development.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"87 ","pages":"Article 101401"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147850031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Design pattern for reusing immutable methods in object-oriented languages","authors":"William Flageol ,&nbsp;Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc ,&nbsp;Stefan Monnier ,&nbsp;Mourad Badri","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2026.101385","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cola.2026.101385","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Programming concepts from functional programming have grown in popularity and have been introduced in object-oriented programming. Among these concepts, immutability is a core concept of functional programming, which brings advantages to software development. However, introducing immutability in object-oriented programming languages presents some challenges.</div></div><div><h3>Problem:</h3><div>One of these challenges, in the concept of inheritance, is overriding of non-destructive mutators. Mutators are necessary for updating data as a software is running. Non-destructive mutators are mutators on immutable objects, which return new objects instead of modifying the receiver. When inheriting non-destructive mutators, a naive implementation will yield code duplication and have code scalability issues.</div></div><div><h3>Contribution:</h3><div>We analyze an example of overriding non-destructive mutators, discuss the challenges, and propose a solution that takes the form of a new design pattern, inspired from the Factory Method pattern. We also discuss the advantages and limitations of this pattern, as well as implementations in eight languages (Clojure, Common Lisp, C#, Java, Kotlin, OCaml, Rust, and Scala). We finally identify and discuss the language features that mostly affect the implementation of this pattern, and present a language extension to Common Lisp to demonstrate the effects of those features on the implementation.</div></div><div><h3>Conclusion:</h3><div>Our proposed design pattern helps reduce the code duplication and improve the code scalability of a naive implementation of inherited non-destructive mutators. However, using a language which includes features for functional updating is required to completely remove the code scalability issues of the implementation. We conclude that object-oriented programming languages should consider adding functional updating to their language features to better support their new functional programming features.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 101385"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146038068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"GeckoGraph: A visual language for polymorphic types","authors":"Shuai Fu,&nbsp;Tim Dwyer,&nbsp;Peter J. Stuckey,&nbsp;John C. Grundy","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2025.101381","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cola.2025.101381","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Polymorphic type is an important feature in most strongly typed programming languages. They allow functions to be written in a way that can be used with different data types, while still enforcing the relationship and constraints between the values. However, programmers often find polymorphic types difficult to use and understand, and tend to reason in terms of concrete types. We propose GeckoGraph, a graphical notation for types. GeckoGraph aims to complement traditional text-based type notation by making reading, understanding, and comparing types easier. We conducted a large-scale user study comparing GeckoGraph to text-based type notation. To our knowledge, this is the largest controlled user study on functional programming ever conducted. The results show no overall significant differences in task completion time or success rate. However, we observed a modest improvement in success rate among beginner participants. For the most challenging task, GeckoGraph improved success rates by 14.5% for beginners and 11.2% for less experienced users. These findings suggest that GeckoGraph has potential as a teaching and learning aid for polymorphic type systems.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 101381"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145738156","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Efficient indexing and querying spatial-keyword data in main memory","authors":"Raúl García-Muñoz ,&nbsp;Francisco García-García ,&nbsp;Antonio Corral ,&nbsp;Michael Vassilakopoulos","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2025.101382","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cola.2025.101382","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The increasing use of GPS-enabled mobile devices and the popularity of location-based services have fueled demand for spatial keyword (SK) queries, which fuse a geographic location with descriptive text. To meet this demand, this paper proposes an improved in-memory IR-tree structure for efficiently storing and querying spatio-textual data. The research details the structure’s design and implementation, alongside efficient in-memory query algorithms, a novel algorithm for the spatio-textual similarity join query. Exhaustive experiments with real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed in-memory IR-tree and its algorithms offer excellent performance, significantly accelerating the processing of all tested SK queries.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 101382"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145840735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Software design smells prediction using machine learning with evolutionary and structural metrics of source code","authors":"Kapil Sharma,&nbsp;Jitender Kumar Chhabra","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2025.101373","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cola.2025.101373","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Software design smells refer to structural abnormalities in a software system that negatively impact maintainability and evolution. Prior research relies on structural metrics for software smell prediction and did not consider the evolutionary aspect. This paper proposes an evolutionary and structural metrics-based method for predicting design smells. A dataset has been curated using multiple versions of Java projects. The proposed method uses ensemble classifiers for classification of design smells, and findings show that adding evolutionary features with structural makes predictions more accurate. In all the design smells, both evolutionary and structural metrics together work better than using structural metrics alone.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 101373"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145659092","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Teaching introductory programming in top universities: A global study of languages, paradigms, assessment, and AI","authors":"João Pedro Gomes ,&nbsp;Redney Monteiro ,&nbsp;André Silva Moreira ,&nbsp;Vítor Mendonça ,&nbsp;Anabela Pinho ,&nbsp;Carlos R. Cunha","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2025.101384","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cola.2025.101384","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines the first two introductory computer science courses (CS1 and CS2) at the world's top universities, focusing on the choice of programming languages and paradigms, assessment types and weights, and policies regarding student use of AI tools. Data were compiled from 150 programming courses across 83 institutions ranked in the Shanghai 2023 Global Ranking of Academic Subjects for Computer Science &amp; Engineering. The analysis reveals that the prevailing languages are Python in CS1 (32.5 %) and Java in CS2 (56.7 %). Typical transitions from CS1 to CS2 involve moving from Python or C to Java. There are some regional preferences: Asian institutions favor lower-level languages like C and C++, whereas European universities explore functional programming languages like Haskell. Regarding programming paradigms, CS1 emphasizes imperative approaches, sometimes introducing object-oriented concepts later in the course, while CS2 consolidates object-oriented programming. However, some CS1 courses adopt a functional paradigm. Course assessments are typically divided into several categories, with a preference for exams and various types of continuous assessments. However, there is also significant use of projects, quizzes, and labs. Examinations usually have the highest weight in the final grade. Course-level policies on students' use of generative AI tools reveal very different approaches, from complete prohibition to active encouragement. These findings offer valuable insights into how leading universities approach programming education in a multidimensional view that includes languages, paradigms, assessments, and AI tools policies.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 101384"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145925531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Assessing Python’s suitability for airborne safety-critical systems under DO-178C guidelines","authors":"Mohammad Mari,&nbsp;Lian Wen","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2025.101383","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cola.2025.101383","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Python is a widely adopted programming language celebrated for its ease of use, dynamic typing, and strong community support. Despite these advantages, Python presents challenges when considered for safety-critical applications, notably those in airborne systems. Concerns arise from performance limitations, limited compile-time checking, and dynamic features that may impact reliability in environments where failures can have severe consequences. Airborne systems, with their stringent safety requirements, provide a context in which these challenges can be critically examined.</div><div>This study evaluates Python’s alignment with the objectives defined in DO-178C (Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification). By analyzing Python’s core characteristics against these rigorous standards, we highlight potential compliance gaps and practical challenges that may hinder its use in safety-critical contexts.</div><div>In addition, we perform a comparative analysis between Python and Rust—a modern systems programming language noted for its safety guarantees and performance. Rust was selected not as a replacement for established baselines such as Ada, C, and C++, but as a complementary point of comparison illustrating how a newer, safety-oriented compiled language contrasts with Python’s interpreted model. Our findings indicate that Python lacks compile-time error checking, exhibits delayed signal handling, and has limited optimization capabilities, which together may affect its performance and reliability. Potential enhancements such as Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation, advanced static analysis, and robust type-checking tools are recommended to mitigate these issues. Overall, our study emphasizes both the strengths and limitations of Python and suggests pathways to improve its viability for safety-critical use.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 101383"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145884600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Stackage repository: An exploratory study of its evolution","authors":"Paul Leger ,&nbsp;Felipe Ruiz ,&nbsp;David Moreno-Lumbreras ,&nbsp;Nicolás Sepúlveda ,&nbsp;Ismael Figueroa ,&nbsp;Nicolás Cardozo","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2026.101386","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cola.2026.101386","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Curated software ecosystems aim to ensure stability and reproducibility, yet their long-term evolution remains poorly understood. This paper presents an empirical study of Stackage, the curated repository of Haskell packages, analyzing 35 releases from 2014 to December 2025 (93,377 packages), more than a decade. By combining quantitative and qualitative analyses of dependency networks, update activity, and monad abstraction usage, we characterize how curation shapes ecosystem evolution. Our results reveal that Stackage evolves through controlled growth: dependency structures remain stable, but a small fraction of highly connected packages accumulate instability risk. The dominant monad libraries (mtl/transformers) exhibit long-term semantic stability.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"86 ","pages":"Article 101386"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146188104","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Toward efficient vibe coding: An LLM-based agent for low-code software development","authors":"Nikolaos Malamas ,&nbsp;Emmanouil Tsardoulias ,&nbsp;Konstantinos Panayiotou ,&nbsp;Andreas L. Symeonidis","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2025.101367","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cola.2025.101367","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The Software Engineering (SE) domain increasingly adopts low-code and no-code approaches to simplify application development and deployment. Two dominant paradigms have emerged in this space: Model-driven Engineering (MDE), leveraging Domain-specific Languages (DSLs) to abstract implementation and reduce the knowledge and expertise required, and LLM-based vibe coding, where developers interact with Large Language Models (LLMs) using natural language, allowing for rapid prototyping and code generation through conversations. Although DSLs provide precise abstractions and formal correctness, they often require specialized knowledge and have a steep learning curve. Conversely, vibe coding enables fluid and natural interactions, but struggles with domain specificity and frequently produces erroneous or unstructured code, which is difficult to integrate into formal development workflows. To harness the strengths of both paradigms, we present <em>DSL Agent</em>, an LLM-powered conversational interface for DSL-based application development. The DSL Agent is embedded within Locsys, a modern low-code development platform. It combines the flexibility and intuitiveness of LLM-based vibe coding with the rigor of DSLs by dynamically generating accurate and valid DSL models based on user descriptions, embedded into a unified conversational interface that leverages prompt engineering and in-context learning techniques. This offers a simpler and more intuitive interface, accelerates the development process, and reduces the expertise barrier. The agent is evaluated by more than 130 workshop participants of varying expertise levels, on two DSLs of different complexity. Evaluation metrics, including valid model rate, user satisfaction, and development time, indicate a significant improvement in valid model generation, productivity, and ease of use compared to traditional DSL-based SE workflows. These results highlight the potential of the DSL Agent to improve the entire DSL-based development life cycle by offering an efficient, intuitive, and user-friendly interface.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"85 ","pages":"Article 101367"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145157808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Representation and system-agnostic automated CAD interoperability testing based on model interchangeability","authors":"Duygu Sap ,&nbsp;Daniel P. Szabo","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2025.101365","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cola.2025.101365","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper, we present theoretically-supported frameworks to test CAD system interoperability based on shape comparison criteria. We introduce a command line tool that provides indirect, representation-independent comparisons of CAD models via abstract proxies and query-based interpretations. Our frameworks support local comparisons using differential properties and offer a broad range of global comparisons. We allow testing for generic CAD software designed for different operating systems or scripting languages. Users can specify tolerance values for testing, ensuring accuracy. This approach bridges CAD model representations, enabling effective interoperability evaluation across diverse systems without requiring in-depth knowledge of CAD software or representations.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"85 ","pages":"Article 101365"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145095459","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}