GeckoGraph: A Visual Language for Polymorphic Types

TL;DR

GeckoGraph introduces a visual notation for polymorphic types to improve understanding and comparison, especially aiding novice programmers, demonstrated through the largest controlled user study in functional programming.

Contribution

It presents a novel graphical notation for polymorphic types and provides empirical evidence of its effectiveness through a large-scale user study.

Findings

GeckoGraph improves task success rates for programmers.

The visual notation aids understanding of polymorphic types.

Novice programmers benefit significantly from GeckoGraph.

Abstract

Polymorphic types are an important feature in most strongly typed programming languages. They allow functions to be written in a way that can be used with different data types, while still enforcing the relationship and constraints between the values. However, programmers often find polymorphic types difficult to use and understand and tend to reason using concrete types. We propose GeckoGraph, a graphical notation for types. GeckoGraph aims to accompany traditional text-based type notation and to make reading, understanding, and comparing types easier. We conducted a large-scale human study using GeckoGraph compared to text-based type notation. To our knowledge, this is the largest controlled user study on functional programming ever conducted. The results of the study show that GeckoGraph helps improve programmers' ability to succeed in the programming tasks we designed, especially for novice programmers.