Harlin Ismail Rizky, Hironori Washizaki and Yoshiaki Fukazawa, “Impact of Using a Static-type System in Computer Programming,” 18th IEEE International Symposium on High Assurance Systems Engineering (HASE 2017), student session, January 12 – 14, 2017, Singapore (to appear)

Static-type systems are a major topic in programming language research and the software industry. Static-type systems should reduce the development time and increase the code quality. Additionally, they are predicted to decrease the number of defects in a piece of code due to early error detection. However, there are only a few empirical experiments on the possible benefits of the static-type system in programming activities. This paper describes an experiment that tests whether static-type systems help developers create solutions for certain programming tasks. The results indicate that although the existence of a static-type system has no positive impact when subjects code a program from scratch, it does allow more errors in program debugging to be fixed.