ChameleonIDE: Untangling Type Errors Through Interactive Visualization and Exploration
Dynamically typed programming languages are popular in education and the software industry. While presenting a low barrier to entry, they suffer from run-time type errors and longer-term problems in code quality and maintainability. Statically typed languages, while showing strength in these aspects, lack in learnability and ease of use. In particular, fixing type errors poses challenges to both novice users and experts. Further, compiler-type error messages are presented in a static way that is biased toward the first occurrence of the error in the program code. To help users resolve such type errors, we introduce ChameleonIDE, a type debugging tool that presents type errors to the user in an unbiased way, allowing them to explore the full context of where the errors could occur. Programmers can interactively verify the steps of reasoning against their intention. Through three studies involving real programmers, we showed that ChameleonIDE is more effective in fixing type errors than traditional text-based error messages. This difference is more significant in harder tasks. Further, programmers actively using ChameleonIDE’s interactive features are shown to be more efficient in fixing type errors than passively reading the type error output.
Mon 15 MayDisplayed time zone: Hobart change
15:45 - 17:15 | Code Summarization and VisualizationReplications and Negative Results (RENE) / Discussion / Research at Meeting Room 106 Chair(s): Banani Roy University of Saskatchewan, Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla IIT Tirupati | ||
15:45 9mFull-paper | An Extensive Study of the Structure Features in Transformer-based Code Semantic Summarization Research Kang Yang , Xinjun Mao National University of Defense Technology, Shangwen Wang National University of Defense Technology, Yihao Qin National University of Defense Technology, Yao Lu National University of Defense Technology, Tanghaoran Zhang , Kamal Al-Sabahi University Of Technology and Applied Sciences-ibra Pre-print | ||
15:54 9mFull-paper | Label Smoothing Improves Neural Source Code Summarization Research Sakib Haque University of Notre Dame, Aakash Bansal University of Notre Dame, Collin McMillan University of Notre Dame Pre-print | ||
16:03 9mFull-paper | Interpretation-based Code Summarization Research Mingyang Geng National University of Defense Technology, Shangwen Wang National University of Defense Technology, Dezun Dong NUDT, Haotian Wang National University of Defense Technolog, Shaomeng Cao Peng Cheng Laboratory, Kechi Zhang Peking University, China, Zhi Jin Peking University Pre-print | ||
16:12 9mFull-paper | Naturalness in Source Code Summarization. How Significant is it? Replications and Negative Results (RENE) | ||
16:21 9mFull-paper | Comparing 2D and Augmented Reality Visualizations for Microservice System Understandability: A Controlled Experiment Research Amr Elsayed Baylor University, Tomas Cerny Baylor University, Davide Taibi Tampere University , Sira Vegas Universidad Politecnica de Madrid DOI Pre-print | ||
16:30 9mFull-paper | ChameleonIDE: Untangling Type Errors Through Interactive Visualization and Exploration Research Shuai Fu Monash University, Tim Dwyer Monash University, Peter J. Stuckey Monash University, Jackson Wain Monash University, Jesse Linossier Monash University Pre-print | ||
16:39 36mPanel | Discussion 4 Discussion |