Helium, for learning Haskell

Heeren, Bastiaan; Leijen, Daan; IJzendoorn, Arjan van

doi:10.1145/871895.871902

Cited by 61 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Jadud noticed that the top Java errors he collected had a similar distribution to five studies using other languages (Jadud, 2006). Inspired by his analysis, Figure 13 shows the frequency of the nine most frequent errors from this study's control group and those from three languages Jadud reported on: Haskell (Heeren, Leijen, and van IJzendoorn, 2003); FORTRAN (Moulton and Muller, 1967); and COBOL (Litecky and Davis, 1976), as well as the most recent study on Java .…”

Section: Basis For Generalizationmentioning

confidence: 60%

Effective compiler error message enhancement for novice programming students

Becker

Glanville

Iwashima

et al. 2016

Computer Science Education

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Programming is an essential skill that all computing students must master. However programming can be difficult to learn. Compiler error messages are crucial for correcting errors, but are often difficult to understand and pose a barrier to progress for many novices. High frequencies of errors, particularly repeated errors, have been shown to be indicators of students who are struggling with learning to program. This study involves a custom IDE that enhances Java compiler error messages, intended to be more useful to novices than those supplied by the compiler. The effectiveness of this approach was tested in an empirical control/intervention study of approximately 200 students generating almost 50,000 errors. The design allows for direct comparisons between enhanced and non-enhanced error messages. Results show that the intervention group experienced reductions in the number of overall errors, errors per student, and several repeated error metrics. This work is important for two reasons. First, the effects of error message enhancement have been recently debated in the literature. This study provides substantial evidence that it can be effective. Second, these results should be generalizable at least in part, to other programming languages, students and institutions, as we show that the control group of this study is comparable to several others using Java and other languages.

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Section: Basis For Generalizationmentioning

confidence: 60%

Effective compiler error message enhancement for novice programming students

Becker

Glanville

Iwashima

et al. 2016

Computer Science Education

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“…The second benchmark, the Helium benchmark [11], contains over 50k Haskell programs logged by Helium [13], a compiler for a substantial subset of Haskell, from first-year undergraduate students working on assignments of a programming course offered at the University of Utrecht during course years 2002-2003 and 2003-2004. Among these programs, 16,632 contain type errors.…”

Section: Benchmarksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diagnosing type errors with class

Zhang

Myers

Vytiniotis

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 36th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation

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Type inference engines often give terrible error messages, and the more sophisticated the type system the worse the problem. We show that even with highly expressive type system implemented by the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC)-including type classes, GADTs, and type families-it is possible to identify the most likely source of the type error, rather than the first source that the inference engine trips over. To determine which are the likely error sources, we apply a simple Bayesian model to a graph representation of the typing constraints; the satisfiability or unsatisfiability of paths within the graph provides evidence for or against possible explanations. While we build on prior work on error diagnosis for simpler type systems, inference in the richer type system of Haskell requires extending the graph with new nodes. The augmentation of the graph creates challenges both for Bayesian reasoning and for ensuring termination. Using a large corpus of Haskell programs, we show that this error localization technique is practical and significantly improves accuracy over the state of the art.

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“…Already longer available alongside GHC are Hugs [21] which was influential on Haskell as a language, NHC98 [38], and YHC [33] derived from NHC98, all mature Haskell 98 compilers with extensions. Helium [17] (also from Utrecht) does not implement full Haskell 98 but focuses on good error reporting, thereby being suitable for learning Haskell. We also mention HBC [1] (not maintained anymore) for completeness.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The architecture of the Utrecht Haskell compiler

Dijkstra

Fokker

Swierstra

2009

Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Haskell

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In this paper we describe the architecture of the Utrecht Haskell Compiler (UHC). UHC is a new Haskell compiler, that supports most (but not all) Haskell 98 features, plus some experimental extensions. It targets multiple backends, including a bytecode interpreter backend and a whole-program analysis backend, both via C. The implementation is rigorously organized as stepwise transformations through some explicit intermediate languages. The tree walks of all transformations are expressed as an algebra, with the aid of an Attribute Grammar based preprocessor. The compiler is just one materialization of a framework that supports experimentation with language variants, thanks to an aspect-oriented internal organization.

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Helium, for learning Haskell

Cited by 61 publications

References 5 publications

Effective compiler error message enhancement for novice programming students

Effective compiler error message enhancement for novice programming students

Diagnosing type errors with class

The architecture of the Utrecht Haskell compiler

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