Comment by nelsonic
2 years ago
How does the author determine this is the "most copied snippet" on SO? The Question/Answer has only been Viewed 351k times. There are posts with many millions of views e.g: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/927358/how-do-i-undo-the... which have definitely been copy-pasted more times. Yes, there may be many instances of this Java function on GitHub. But only because the people doing the copying are too lazy to think about how it works never mind alter the function name. If there's a bug, just update the SO answer and fix the problem. No need to write a lengthy self-promoting post about it.
Third paragraph of the post:
It's according to this paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-018-9650-5
> How does the author determine this is the "most copied snippet" on SO?
According to [this paper](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-018-9650-5) it's the most copied *from SO java answers*.
It's mentioned in the article
> A PhD student by the name Sebastian Baltes publishes a paper in the journal of Empirical Software Engineering. The title is Usage and Attribution of Stack Overflow Code Snippets in GitHub Projects [...] As part of their analysis they extracted code snippets from the Stack Overflow data dump and matched them against code from public GitHub repos.
It's described in the article...
Read the article. The methodology is flawed. It should say most copy-pasted Java function on GitHub.
it does say that: "We present results of a large-scale empiricalstudy analyzing the usage and attribution of non-trivial Java"
You asked:
> How does the author determine this is the "most copied snippet" on SO?
People answered. Should they not have?
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