Automatically Generating Documentation for Lambda Expressions in Java

Abstract

When lambda expressions were introduced to the Java programming language as part of the release of Java 8 in 2014, they were the language's first step into functional programming. Since lambda expressions are still relatively new, not all developers use or understand them. In this paper, we first present the results of an empirical study to determine how frequently developers of GitHub repositories make use of lambda expressions and how they are documented. We find that 11% of Java GitHub repositories use lambda expressions, and that only 6% of the lambda expressions are accompanied by source code comments. We then present a tool called LambdaDoc which can automatically detect lambda express..