[Python-Dev] Ph.D. dissertation ideas? (original) (raw)

Jason Orendorff jason.orendorff at gmail.com
Sun Jan 15 01:17:19 CET 2006

Brett,

You could create a downloadable corpus of Python source code, and maybe a web site through which people can easily browse/search it, contribute to it, and maintain it. The point would be to support language designers, tool developers, and researchers. Several python-dev folks have their own corpuses; I think other people would be happy to use a free one if it were out there.

Of course there's no need to limit it to Python...

Creating a really good corpus is maybe not super-easy; I imagine there are myriad linguistics papers explaining the nuances. Hey, cross-discipline research--cool points!

Once this exists, there's no shortage of research questions you can quickly and easily answer with it. What percentage of Python programs use functional programming techniques? How often are list comprehensions used? What do people use generators for?

And if you do something web-based, you can certainly work XML in there somewhere. :)

-j

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