An empirical investigation of the effects of type systems and code completion on API usability using TypeScript and JavaScript in MS visual studio

Abstract

Recent empirical studies that compared static and dynamic type systems on API usability showed a positive impact of static type systems on developer productivity in most cases. Nevertheless, it is unclear how large this effect is in comparison to other factors. One obvious factor in programming is tooling: It is commonly accepted that modern IDEs have a large positive impact on developers, although it is not clear which parts of modern IDEs are responsible for that. One possible---and for most developers obvious candidate---is code completion. This paper describes a 2x2 randomized trial that compares JavaScript and Microsoft's statically typed alternative TypeScript with and without code completion in MS Visual Studio. While the experiment shows (in correspondence to previous experiments) a large positive effect of the statically typed language TypeScript, the code completion effect is not only marginal, but also just approaching statistical significance. This seems to be an indicator that the effect of static type systems is larger than often assumed, at least in comparison to code completion.

A systematic mapping study of API usability evaluation methods

“…There is also contradiction regarding how different authors define the same usabiltity factor, for example, Farooq and Dieter [30] defined productivity as ratio of the mean number of bugs per test/session iteration [30], while Fisher and Stefan [33] defined productivity as a number of tasks completed in a given time. Below, we give a brief summary of usability factors addressed in the literature and shown in Appendix E. These usability factors are not mutually exclusive, as usability factors are subjective in nature.…”

“…Ellis et al [28] identified debuggability as a usability factor and Nanz et al [63] terms it as better debugging. Some studies have used the same term with different meanings, e.g., Farooq and Zirkler [30] defined productivity as a ratio of the mean number of bugs per test/session iteration and Fischer and Hanenberg [33] define productivity as number of tasks completed in a given time.…”