Toward a Corpus Study of the Dynamic Gradual Type
Programming Languages
2025-03-13 v1 Human-Computer Interaction
Software Engineering
Abstract
Gradually-typed languages feature a dynamic type that supports implicit coercions, greatly weakening the type system but making types easier to adopt. Understanding how developers use this dynamic type is a critical question for the design of useful and usable type systems. This paper reports on an in-progress corpus study of the dynamic type in Python, targeting 221 GitHub projects that use the mypy type checker. The study reveals eight patterns-of-use for the dynamic type, which have implications for future refinements of the mypy type system and for tool support to encourage precise type annotations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2503.08928,
title = {Toward a Corpus Study of the Dynamic Gradual Type},
author = {Dibri Nsofor and Ben Greenman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.08928},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Accepted to HATRA 2024