Helping to find the usefulness of a proposal

[Joe Darcy]

brucechapman at paradise.net.nz wrote:
> Good idea,
> 
> Should they each be evaluated against the same corpus and what would 
> be a suitable corpus?
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_linguistics

On that front, Alex sent me the following:

> Analysis of a micro-corpus of your own or your company's code is
> unscientific.
> 
> Ewan Tempero and his colleagues at the University of Auckland have 
> done excellent, peer-reviewed work on how Java language features are 
> used in real-world code. Their "Qualitas Corpus" consists of over 
> 100,000 classes - see http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ewan/corpus/
> 
> If someone showed that, say, a null check occurs on average every 15 
> lines of code in this corpus, and that null-safe operators could 
> remove those lines without adverse side effects, then that would be a
> real contribution to Project Coin.

I agree that using a standard, large corpus to empirically examine the 
utility of the Project Coin proposals would be a fine component of their 
evaluation.

-Joe