research-article

An experiment about static and dynamic type systems: doubts about the positive impact of static type systems on development time

Author:

Stefan HanenbergAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 45, Issue 10

Pages 22 - 35

https://doi.org/10.1145/1932682.1869462

Published: 17 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Although static type systems are an essential part in teach-ing and research in software engineering and computer science, there is hardly any knowledge about what the impact of static type systems on the development time or the resulting quality for a piece of software is. On the one hand there are authors that state that static type systems decrease an application's complexity and hence its development time (which means that the quality must be improved since developers have more time left in their projects). On the other hand there are authors that argue that static type systems increase development time (and hence decrease the code quality) since they restrict developers to express themselves in a desired way. This paper presents an empirical study with 49 subjects that studies the impact of a static type system for the development of a parser over 27 hours working time. In the experiments the existence of the static type system has neither a positive nor a negative impact on an application's development time (under the conditions of the experiment).

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Index Terms

An experiment about static and dynamic type systems: doubts about the positive impact of static type systems on development time
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 45, Issue 10

OOPSLA '10

October 2010

957 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/1932682

Issue’s Table of Contents

OOPSLA '10: Proceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
October 2010
984 pages
ISBN:9781450302036
DOI:10.1145/1869459
General Chairs:
William R. Cook
University of Texas at Austin
,
Siobhán Clarke
Trinity College Dublin
,
Program Chairs:
Martin Rinard
MIT
,
Kevin J. Sullivan
University of Virginia
,
Daniel H. Steinberg
Dim Sum Thinking Inc.

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 17 October 2010

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 45, Issue 10

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Cited By

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https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-024-09690-4
Khan FChen BVarro DMcIntosh S(2022)An Empirical Study of Type-Related Defects in Python ProjectsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.308206848:8(3145-3158)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2021.3082068
Zhang JLi FHao DWang MTang HZhang LHarman M(2021)A Study of Bug Resolution Characteristics in Popular Programming LanguagesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2019.296189747:12(2684-2697)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2019.2961897
Pang AAnslow CNoble J(2018)What Programming Languages Do Developers Use? A Theory of Static vs Dynamic Language Choice2018 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VLHCC.2018.8506534(239-247)Online publication date: Oct-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/VLHCC.2018.8506534
Gao ZBird CBarr EUchitel SOrso ARobillard M(2017)To type or not to typeProceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2017.75(758-769)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE.2017.75
Milojković NGhafari MNierstrasz OScanniello GLo DSerebrenik A(2017)Exploiting type hints in method argument names to improve lightweight type inferenceProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1109/ICPC.2017.33(77-87)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
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Hanenberg S(2017)Empirical, Human-Centered Evaluation of Programming and Programming Language Constructs: Controlled ExperimentsGrand Timely Topics in Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-319-60074-1_3(45-72)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2017
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Kurtev SChristensen TThomsen BAnslow CLaToza TSunshine J(2016)Discount method for programming language evaluationProceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools10.1145/3001878.3001879(1-8)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2016
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Milojković NBéra CGhafari MNierstrasz OLaval JEtien A(2016)Inferring Types by Mining Class Usage Frequency from Inline CachesProceedings of the 11th edition of the International Workshop on Smalltalk Technologies10.1145/2991041.2991047(1-11)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2016
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