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Dimensions of Examples: Toward a Framework for Qualifying Examples in Programming

Authors Toni Mattis , Lukas Böhme , Stefan Ramson , Tom Beckmann , Martin C. Rinard , Robert Hirschfeld

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  • Software and its engineering → Software notations and tools
  • Software and its engineering → Documentation
Keywords
  • Examples
  • Live Programming
  • Evaluation

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Abstract

Programming requires understanding, using, and changing abstract source code and other representations of programs. Concrete examples demonstrate a particular instance of their abstract behavior. Hence, they play an important role in program comprehension, specification, and testing of requirements. Authoring examples entails a range of - often implicit - decisions about the content and presentation of the example. In this work, we attempt to structure this decision space by describing a set of dimensions that characterize examples in programming. As the manual effort of creating examples is increasingly automated, e.g., through the use of generative AI, we expect this catalog of dimensions to help users and tool developers parametrize, guide, and evaluate the generation of examples in terms of the vocabulary we present here.

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Toni Mattis, Lukas Böhme, Stefan Ramson, Tom Beckmann, Martin C. Rinard, and Robert Hirschfeld. Dimensions of Examples: Toward a Framework for Qualifying Examples in Programming. In Companion Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming (Programming 2025). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 134, pp. 13:1-13:11, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.Programming.2025.13

Author Details

Toni Mattis
  • Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany
Lukas Böhme
  • Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany
Stefan Ramson
  • Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany
Tom Beckmann
  • Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany
Martin C. Rinard
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Robert Hirschfeld
  • Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the HPI-MIT "Designing for Sustainability" research program. We also gratefully acknowledge the financial support of HPI’s Research School.

References

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