Software engineering involves writing new code or editing existing code. Recent efforts have investigated the neural processes associated with reading and comprehending code —- however, we lack a thorough understanding of the human cognitive processes underlying code writing. While prose reading and writing have been studied thoroughly, that same scrutiny has not been applied to code writing. In this paper, we leverage functional brain imaging to investigate neural representations of code writing in comparison to prose writing.

ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering

Association for Computing Machinery

9781450371216

10.1145/3377811.3380348