Smart Programming Playgrounds

Modern IDEs contain sophisticated components for inferring missing types, correcting bad syntax and completing partial expressions in code, but they are limited to the context that is explicitly defined in a project's configuration. These tools are ill-suited for quick prototyping of incomplete code snippets, such as those found on the Web in Q&A forums or walk-through tutorials, since such code snippets often assume the availability of external dependencies and may even contain implicit references to an execution environment that provides data or compute services. We propose an architecture for smart programming playgrounds that can facilitate rapid prototyping of incomplete code snippets through a semi-automatic context resolution that involves identifying static dependencies, provisioning external resources on the cloud and injecting resource bindings to handles in the original code fragment. Such a system could be potentially useful in a range of different scenarios, from sharing code snippets on the Web to experimenting with new ideas during traditional software development.