Understanding misunderstandings in source code

@article{Gopstein2017UnderstandingMI,
  title={Understanding misunderstandings in source code},
  author={Dan Gopstein and Jake Iannacone and Yu Yan and Lois DeLong and Yanyan Zhuang and Martin K.-C. Yeh and Justin Cappos},
  journal={Proceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering},
  year={2017}
}
Humans often mistake the meaning of source code, and so misjudge a program's true behavior. These mistakes can be caused by extremely small, isolated patterns in code, which can lead to significant runtime errors. These patterns are used in large, popular software projects and even recommended in style guides. To identify code patterns that may confuse programmers we extracted a preliminary set of `atoms of confusion' from known confusing code. We show empirically in an experiment with 73… 
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