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Nowadays, programmers spend much of their workday dealing with code libraries and frameworks that are bloated with APIs. One common way of interacting with APIs is through Code Completion inside the code editor. By default, Code Completion presents in a popup pane, in alphabetical order or by relevance, all accessible members available in the apparent type and supertypes of a receiver expression. This default behavior for Code Completion should and can be further improved because (1) not all public methods are APIs and presenting non-API public members to a programmer is misleading, (2) certain APIs are meant to be accessible only in some limited contexts but not others, (3) the alphabetical order separates otherwise logically related APIs, making it hard to see their connection and to work with, and (4) commonly used APIs are often presented long after much less used APIs due to suboptimal API sorting strategies. BCC (Better Code Completion) addresses these problems by enhancing Code Completion so that programmers can control how specific API elements should be sorted, filtered, and grouped. We report our preliminary validation results from testing BCC with Java projects that make use of the AWT/Swing APIs. For one large project, the BCC approach reduces by over ninety percent the total number of APIs that a programmer would have to scroll through using Eclipse's Code Completion before settling on the desired ones.
Hou et al. (Tue,) studied this question.