Can static type systems speed up programming? An experimental evaluation of static and dynamic type systems

Master's Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Computer Science - Software grade: 10 University of Duisburg-Essen (Institute for Computer Science and Business Information Systems) course: Informatik - Empirische Softwareforschung language: English abstract: Type systems of programming languages are a much discussed topic of software engineering. There are many voices arguing towards static as well as dynamic type systems although their actual impact on software development is rarely evaluated using rigorous scientific methods. In the context of this work a controlled experiment with 36 participants was conducted which tried to compare the performance of software developers using a static and a dynamic type system for the same tasks using an undocumented API. The two programming languages used were Java and Groovy. The experiment and its results are analyzed and discussed in this thesis. Its main hypothesis was that a static type system speeds up the time developers need to solve programming tasks in an undocumented API. The main results of the experiment speak strongly in favor of this hypothesis because the static type system seems to have a significantly positive impact on the development time.