I want to showcase a fun example that demonstrates the power of using chatGPT to refactor code so it is more comprehensible and useful for examples. I was trying to show some examples in one of my programming classes of the three-argument version of the Java streams reduced terminal operator. So, I did some digging and came upon a particular example available on GitHub. The code demonstrates using the three-arity reduce operator in the case where the streamed type is different from the accumulator result type.
However, the problem with this example was that it was not clear what it was doing. It had states and values, but there was no explanation of what they meant. So, I wanted to find a way to make this example more meaningful.
To achieve this, I decided to use chatGPT. I selected the code from the example and pasted it into chatGPT, asking it to regenerate the code to make the example more compelling and understandable. ChatGPT suggested adding comments, making variable names more understandable, and initializing data structures better.
The regenerated code provided by chatGPT introduced a retail store example with different types of products and their prices. It used the double curly brace initialization syntax for cleaner initialization. The code then computed the total discount by reducing the original prices using the three-arity reduce terminal operation. This new example was much more understandable and intuitive, making it easier to relate to a real-world scenario.
In conclusion, chatGPT proved to be a valuable tool for refactoring code and making it more comprehensible. It helped improve the example by providing better comments, descriptive variable names, and modern Java syntax. This demonstrates how chatGPT can be used to refactor arbitrary Java code and make it more relevant and easier to understand for teaching purposes.
