Improving code completion with program history

Code completion is a widely used productivity tool. It takes away the burden of remembering and typing the exact names of methods or classes: As a developer starts typing a name, it provides a progressively refined list of candidates matching the name. However, the candidate list usually comes in alphabetic order, i.e., the environment is only second-guessing the name based on pattern matching, relying on human intervention to pick the correct one. Finding the correct candidate can thus be cumbersome or slower than typing the full name.