Quack is a research prototype designed to test the usefulness of "keyword programming" or "sloppy programming" in Java. The idea of sloppy programming is that the user types something suggestive of the code they want, and the system bends over backwards to try and make sense of it.

Presumably, if the sloppy programming interpreter always guesses the user's intentions correctly, then it is be a preferrable way to program. Any system we build will necessarily fall short of this goal, and the question is: can we make something accurate and fast enough to be useful.

Quack is such an attempt, though our user studies suggest that it fails to be useful in many cases.

Quack is a plug-in for Eclipse that performs sloppy programming translations in Java code. You use Quack by typing some keywords inside of a Java source file, and invoking Eclipse's Content-Assist, which is usually mapped to Ctrl-Space. Quack will then try to suggest some lines of Java code that contain the keywords, as shown: