Compiler Error Messages Considered Unhelpful

How the Analyzer can Help the User Help the Analyzer

“…And notations used to convey information to the tool could also benefit from the point of view of cognitive science [4]. Just looking at the specific issue of tool messages, the lessons learned from research on compiler error messages have direct implications for the design and implementation of program proof tools [3]. In this article, we presented the current state of such machine-to-human interactions in the SPARK technology, in the hope that it can trigger interesting human-to-human interactions in the community around proof tools.…”

Security Notifications in Static Analysis Tools: Developers’ Attitudes, Comprehension, and Ability to Act on Them

“…One of the most common ways developers have historically gotten feedback about their code is through compiler error messages, which provide feedback when code does not adhere to the language requirements. Given their ubiquity, developer interactions with these error messages has been studied for some years [8,13,85,94]. Focusing on usability issues, we know that a developers' ability to read a compiler error message is correlated with their ability to complete a programming task correctly [9].…”

An empirical evaluation of the formative feedback supported by dashboard in the context of compilation error

“…Research has shown that learners perceive the examples as an assistance to them [24, 32, 36]. Nonetheless, the feedback of the example‐based development environment to the student has proven to be pedagogically questionable, as there is no guarantee that the student can relate the generic example to a specific code error or that they have sufficient knowledge to make sense of the example [3]. Furthermore, on a practical level, Prather et al [27] noted that showing code samples to novice learners to correct errors confused them because they spent a substantial amount of time searching for that code sample in their files.…”

“…Recent research have included some improvements regarding feedback given by development environments, thus allowing it to be both formative and immediate [10, 20]. Despite this progress, the authors of said research have confirmed that the nature of said feedback is minimum, as it assists the programmer in correcting errors, but does not inform them of the reasons why the error occurs, which turns it more difficult to be construed and understood [3]. As a consequence, feedback is not completely formative because it does not become task‐specific, corrective, and positive [30, 33].…”