Just TYPEical: Visualizing Common Function Type Signatures in R (VIS 2020 FFWD)
Channel: Northeastern University Data Visualization
Date: 09/04/2021

TYPEical is an interactive visualization for exploration and analysis of type usage in a programming language. It visualizes type signatures of function calls as flows, with the width corresponding to the popularity of the type signatures in the underlying data set. TYPEical provides facilities for filtering data and customizing the layout and amount of information shown at a time.

For more info please see our website at https://typeical.github.io/ and our paper with all supplemental materials at https://osf.io/pyqac/

Related videos:
* VIS 2020 FFWD: https://youtu.be/wqp8Y20SS-8
* VIS 2020 Talk: https://youtu.be/9iHMKL0iVOA
* VIS 2020 Demo: https://youtu.be/y7mnYAyB2o4

Citation:
Cameron Moy, Julia Belyakova, Alexi Turcotte, Sara Di Bartolomeo, and Cody Dunne, "Just TYPEical: Visualizing Common Function Type Signatures in R," in Proc. IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS '20), 2020. doi: 10.1109/VIS47514.2020.00031 preprint and materials doi: 10.31219/osf.io/pyqac

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 https://osf.io/pyqac/

Keywords: design study, design study "lite" methodology, programming language design, R, visualization.