An oracle for object-oriented programmers
In the last 40 years, the major innovation in software engineering has been the development of what are called object-oriented programming languages. “Objects” are, effectively, repositories for the computational details of a program, which let the programmer concentrate on the big picture. A complex computer program, with millions of lines of code, can be distilled into some fairly intuitive interactions between objects.For programmers building a large application from scratch, object-oriented programming is a boon, allowing them to add new functions or make major revisions by changing just a few lines of code. But for a programmer dropped into the middle of a massive development project, trying to navigate the thicket of existing objects can be bewildering. Learning what the objects are and what they do might take days or even weeks.At the Association for Computing Machinery’s SPLASH conference at the end of the month, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and...