On Code Reuse from StackOverflow: An Exploratory Study on Jupyter Notebook

Abstract

Jupyter Notebook is a popular tool among data analysts and scientists for working with data. It provides a way to combine code, documentation, and visualizations in a single, interactive environment, facilitating code reuse. While code reuse can improve programming efficiency, it can also decrease readability, security, and overall performance. We conduct a large-scale exploratory study of code reuse practices in the Jupyter Notebook development community on the Stack Overflow platform to understand the potential negative impacts of code reuse. Our findings identified 1,097,470 Jupyter Notebook clone pairs that reuse Stack Overflow code snippets, and the average code snippet has 7.91 code quality violations. Through our research, we gain insight into the reasons behind Jupyter Notebook developers' decision to reuse code and the potential drawbacks of this practice.