Just TYPEical: Visualizing Common Function Type Signatures in R

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Cameron Moy, Julia Belyakova, Alexi Turcotte, Sara Di Bartolomeo, Cody Dunne

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 View presentation:2020-10-28T16:50:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2020-10-28T16:50:00Z

Exemplar figure — Our type flow visualization shows the type signatures of functions in R. Function names are listed at the top followed by the first two argument types.

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Keywords

Human-centered computing-Visualization

Abstract

Data-driven approaches to programming language design are uncommon. Despite the availability of large code repositories, distilling semantically-rich information from programs remains difficult. Important dimensions, like run-time type data, are inscrutable without the appropriate tools. We contribute a task abstraction and interactive visualization, TYPEical, for programming language designers who are exploring and analyzing type information from execution traces. Our approach aids user understanding of function type signatures across many executions. Insights derived from our visualization are aimed at informing language design decisions — specifically of a new gradual type system being developed for the R programming language. A copy of this paper, along with all the supplemental material, is available at osf.io/mc6zt