How to infer a program transformation from one example?

This blog is a brief introduction of the ASE’19 paper:

Inferring Program Transformations From Singular Examples via Big Code. [Jiajun Jiang, Luyao Ren, Yingfei Xiong, Lingming Zhang]

As we all know that repetitive program developing is a common practice in real world, where similar or even the same code snippets are created via independent coding or copy-past-like operations. However, repetitive code snippets are considered harmful as they potentially increase the burden of developers during both development and maintenance procedures. For example, when a faulty code snippet exists multiple copies in projects, a lot of manual efforts will be required to…