A Retrospective on Developing Code Clone Detector CCFinder and Its Impact

In this retrospective article of our TSE paper “CCFinder: A Multilinguistic Token-Based Code Clone Detection System for Large Scale Source Code” (Kamiya et al., 2002), we revisit the reasons why we became deeply involved in code clone research, and explore what has driven its frequent citation in many studies. Furthermore, we reflect on why not only our own lab, but also numerous researchers and tool developers have pursued code clone research and the development of related tools.