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User studies
Let's solve some puzzles

{% include JB/setup %}

Online version

We would like to better understand how programmers deal with their type errors and how good they are in figuring out what does the typechecker do in general. We would be very grateful if you could spend some time on our survey available online at:

http://edu.surveygizmo.com/s3/1179878/Type-Debugger-user-studies

This should also help you in understanding the capabilities and limitations of the tool so that you can use it yourself in your everyday programming in Scala.

Offline version

Please try the online version first, we want to better understand how to help programmers with their typing problems!

In order to verify the applicability of our prototype to dealing with type system problems in Scala we will be performing user studies on real problems. We will cover a range of issues that a typical programmer can experience during everyday programming. Some of the topics include:

  • basics that include simple member selection or typechecking application
  • subtyping
  • type inference (also understanding its limitations for higher-kinded types)
  • implicit search
  • variance

Target audience for our user studies ranges from beginners to advanced Scala users. Therefore, depending on the skills of the programmer, some of the posted questions might seem trivial but others too hard. In fact some of problems were inspired by questions posted on Scala mailing list or Stackoverflow.

We exercise Scala's type system using self-contained classes. They are often minimizations of real problems therefore type debugger does not benefit from them in some special way. At the end of the survey we provide a link to all all the examples and questions so that users can experiment with them more outside of this user study. The final section of the study conatins a number of (open) questions regarding the tool.

How to start solving type system puzzles?

All the examples are located in the userstudies so just clone the repository using

git clone git://github.com/hubertp/type-debugger-tutorial.git
cd type-debugger-tutorial/userstudies/src/main/scala/examples
scalad subtyping/Subtyping01.scala

That will start the first example for subtyping questions.

All the examples are in the type-debugger-tutorial/userstudies/src/main/scala/examples directory.

Questions (this will be changed to the online-survey that does all the timing, gathering data etc):