Towards Human-Centered Types & Type Debugging

Advanced type systems, such as Rust’s Ownership, are gaining wider popularity among mainstream programming languages. And yet, despite users’ evident struggles with working with these systems, research on tools and techniques for improving the usability of types is rather scarce, and focused mostly on improving type error messages. In this paper, I hope to spark a discussion on human-centered tools and techniques for working with advanced type systems by surveying previous works and synthesizing them into a set of sketches for future research.