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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

OOPSLA '10: Proceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications

Pages 22 - 35

https://doi.org/10.1145/1869459.1869462

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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cover image ACM Conferences

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.

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

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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Published: 17 October 2010

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SPLASH '10: Systems Programming Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 17 - 21, 2010

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Cited By

Gordon CEdwards JTaeumel M(2024)The Linguistics of ProgrammingProceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3689492.3689806(162-182)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689492.3689806
Chen ZChen LYang YFeng QLi XSong W(2024)Risky Dynamic Typing-related Practices in Python: An Empirical StudyACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/364959333:6(1-35)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649593
Gordillo ACalero CMoraga MGarcía FFernandes JAbreu RSaraiva J(2024)Programming languages ranking based on energy measurementsSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-024-09690-432:4(1539-1580)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-024-09690-4
Furia CTorkar RFeldt R(2023)Towards Causal Analysis of Empirical Software Engineering Data: The Impact of Programming Languages on Coding CompetitionsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/361166733:1(1-35)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2023
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Bogner JMerkel MLo DMcIntosh SNovielli N(2022)To type or not to type?Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3524842.3528454(658-669)Online publication date: 23-May-2022
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Rao AChimalakonda SLi JJaccheri LDingsøyr TChitchyan R(2020)An Exploratory Study Towards Understanding Lambda Expressions in PythonProceedings of the 24th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3383219.3383255(318-323)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2020
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Chen LWu DMa WZhou YXu BLeung H(2020)How C++ Templates Are Used for Generic ProgrammingACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/335657929:1(1-49)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2020
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Shen JRinard MCombemale BMernik MRumpe B(2017)Robust programs with filtered iteratorsProceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering10.1145/3136014.3136030(244-255)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2017
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