Onward! 2016
Sun 30 October - Fri 4 November 2016 Amsterdam, Netherlands
co-located with SPLASH 2016
Wed 2 Nov 2016 11:45 - 12:10 at Zürich 2 - Session 1 Chair(s): Emerson Murphy-Hill

Although dynamically typed languages allow developers to be more productive in writing source code, their lack of in- formation about types of variables is one of the main obstacles during program comprehension. Static type information helps developers to decrease software maintenance time. Inference of types of variables requires complex algorithms to avoid false positives or negatives. Their main aim is to shorten the list of possible types for a variable.
We have developed a couple of cheap heuristics that use easily accessible information about the presence of each class in the available source code to promote the correct type towards the top of the list of possible types for a variable.
Our evaluation of a proof-of-concept prototype, implemented in Pharo Smalltalk, shows that both for domain- specific types and standard libraries these heuristics tend to work well. The evaluated heuristics prove to be reasonably precise, promoting the correct types of a variable towards the top of the list in 50.67% up to 89.09% of cases on average, depending on the applied heuristic. The heuristic that has proved to be the best was compared with one existing type inference algorithm and the best heuristic yields significantly better results with less effort.

Wed 2 Nov

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

10:30 - 12:10
Session 1Onward! Papers at Zürich 2
Chair(s): Emerson Murphy-Hill Google
10:30
25m
Talk
Lightweight Programming Experiments without Programmers and Programs: An Example Study on the Effect of Similarity and Number of Object Identifiers on the Readability of Source Code using Natural Texts
Onward! Papers
Tim Marter University of Duisburg-Essen, Paul Babucke University of Duisburg-Essen, Philipp Lembken University of Duisburg-Essen, Stefan Hanenberg University of Duisburg-Essen
DOI
10:55
25m
Talk
Emergent Software Services
Onward! Papers
Nicolás Cardozo Universidad de los Andes
DOI Pre-print Media Attached
11:20
25m
Talk
Nez: Practical Open Grammar Language
Onward! Papers
Kimio Kuramitsu Yokohama National University, Japan
DOI
11:45
25m
Talk
Exploring Cheap Type Inference Heuristics in Dynamically Typed Languages
Onward! Papers
Nevena Milojković University of Bern, Oscar Nierstrasz University of Bern, Switzerland
DOI