Pruning Engine

A method performed by a device having an operating system and a system library for enhancing operable functionality of a software program, comprising:

• receiving, by the device, a plurality of input source code files from the software program submitted by a developer;
• preprocessing each input source code file with a plurality of codeword processing operations selected from a group consisting of a stopword removal operation, a splitting operation, a stemming operation, a conversion operation, a semantic information addition operation, or a wordnet integration operation, thereby generating a plurality of preprocessed input source code files;
• identifying, by the device, one or more candidate code snippets from the plurality of preprocessed input source code files by pruning one or more preprocessed input source code files that do not meet a similarity threshold measure for library functions stored in the system library;
• identifying, by the device, at least a first validated code snippet from the one or more candidate code snippets that matches a first library function stored in the system memory on the basis of at least first and second matching metrics;
• and
• presenting, to the developer, a library function recommendation comprising the first validated code snippet, the first library function, and instructions for replacing the first validated code snippet with the first library function.