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Record W3085434149 · doi:10.1145/3387904.3389259

The Secret Life of Commented-Out Source Code

2020· article· en· W3085434149 on OpenAlexafffund
Tri Minh Triet Pham, Jinqiu Yang

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicSoftware Engineering Research
Canadian institutionsConcordia University
FundersCanadian Network for Research and Innovation in Machining Technology, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaConcordia University of Edmonton
KeywordsComputer scienceCode (set theory)Programming languageSource codeCode reviewProgram comprehensionNatural languageNatural (archaeology)KPI-driven code analysisSoftwareComprehensionStatic program analysisSoftware engineeringSoftware developmentNatural language processingSoftware systemHistory

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Source code commenting is a common practice to improve code comprehension in software development. While comments often consist of descriptive natural language, surprisingly, there exists a non-trivial portion of comments that are actually code statements, i.e., commented-out code (CO code), even in well-maintained software systems. Commented-out code practice is rarely studied and often excluded in prior studies on comments due to its irrelevance to natural language. When being openly discussed, CO practice is generally considered a bad practice. However, there is no prior work to assess the nature (prevalence, evolution, motivation, and necessity of utilization) of CO code practice.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.023
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.207
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.023
Threshold uncertainty score0.123

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0230.207
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0040.002
Science and technology studies0.0050.012
Scholarly communication0.0080.014
Open science0.0010.007
Research integrity0.0030.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.003

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.036
GPT teacher head0.269
Teacher spread0.234 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations5
Published2020
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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