An Empirical Investigation of the Effects of Type Systems and Code Completion on API Usability using TypeScript and JavaScript in MS Visual Studio
Recent empirical studies that compared static and dynamic type systems on API usability showed in most case a positive impact of static type systems on developer productivity. But it is unclear how large this effect is in comparison to other factors. One obvious factor in programming experiments is tooling: It is commonly accepted that modern IDEs have a large positive impact on developers, although it is not clear what parts of modern IDEs are responsible for that. One possible, and for most developers obvious candidate is code completion. This paper describes a 2x2 randomized trial that compares JavaScript and Microsoft’s statically typed alternative TypeScript with and without code completion in MS Visual Studio. While the experiment showed (in correspondence to previous experiments) a large positive effect of the statically typed language TypeScript, the code completion effect is not only marginal, but also only close to significant. This seems to be an indicator that the effect of static type systems is larger than often assumed — at least in comparison to code completion.
Tue 27 OctDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
15:30 - 17:30 | |||
15:30 24mTalk | Measuring Polymorphism in Python Programs DLS | ||
15:54 24mTalk | Tracking Down Performance Variation Against Source Code Evolution DLS | ||
16:18 24mTalk | Server-Side Type Profiling for Optimizing Client-Side JavaScript Engines DLS Madhukar Kedlaya University of California, Santa Barbara, Behnam Robatmili Qualcomm Research, Ben Hardekopf UC Santa Barbara | ||
16:42 24mTalk | An Empirical Investigation of the Effects of Type Systems and Code Completion on API Usability using TypeScript and JavaScript in MS Visual Studio DLS Lars Fischer University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany, Stefan Hanenberg University of Duisburg-Essen | ||
17:06 24mTalk | Access Control to Reflection with Object Ownership DLS Camille Teruel INRIA, Stéphane Ducasse INRIA, France, Damien Cassou Lille 1 University, Marcus Denker INRIA Lille |