research-article

Polymorphism in the spotlight: studying its prevalence in Java and Smalltalk

Authors:

Nevena Milojković,

Andrea Caracciolo,

Mircea Filip Lungu,

Oscar Nierstrasz,

David Röthlisberger,

Romain RobbesAuthors Info & Claims

ICPC '15: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Program Comprehension

Pages 186 - 195

Published: 16 May 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Subtype polymorphism is a cornerstone of object-oriented programming. By hiding variability in behavior behind a uniform interface, polymorphism decouples clients from providers and thus enables genericity, modularity and extensibility. At the same time, however, it scatters the implementation of the behavior over multiple classes thus potentially hampering program comprehension.

The extent to which polymorphism is used in real programs and the impact of polymorphism on program comprehension are not very well understood. We report on a preliminary study of the prevalence of polymorphism in several hundred open source software systems written in Smalltalk, one of the oldest object-oriented programming languages, and in Java, one of the most widespread ones.

Although a large portion of the call sites in these systems are polymorphic, a majority have a small number of potential candidates. Smalltalk uses polymorphism to a much greater extent than Java. We discuss how these findings can be used as input for more detailed studies in program comprehension and for better developer support in the IDE.

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Cited By

Lotfi EMohammed B(2018)Teaching Object Oriented Programming Concepts Through a Mobile Serious GameProceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Smart City Applications10.1145/3286606.3286851(1-6)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3286606.3286851
Milojković NGhafari MNierstrasz OScanniello GLo DSerebrenik A(2017)Exploiting type hints in method argument names to improve lightweight type inferenceProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1109/ICPC.2017.33(77-87)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICPC.2017.33
Milojković NGhafari MNierstrasz OScanniello GLo DSerebrenik A(2017)It's duck (typing) season!Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1109/ICPC.2017.10(312-315)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICPC.2017.10

Index Terms

Polymorphism in the spotlight: studying its prevalence in Java and Smalltalk
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development process management
      1. Software development methods
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Polymorphism
      2. Language types
        Object oriented languages

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICPC '15: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Program Comprehension

May 2015

325 pages

General Chair:
Andrea De Lucia
University of Salerno, Italy
,
Program Chairs:
Christian Bird
Microsoft Research
,
Rocco Oliveto
University of Molise, Italy

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
IEEE-CS\DATC: IEEE Computer Society
TCSE: IEEE Computer Society's Tech. Council on Software Engin.

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IEEE Press

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Published: 16 May 2015

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ICSE '15

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ICSE '15: 37th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 16 - 24, 2015

Florence, Italy

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Cited By

Lotfi EMohammed B(2018)Teaching Object Oriented Programming Concepts Through a Mobile Serious GameProceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Smart City Applications10.1145/3286606.3286851(1-6)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3286606.3286851
Milojković NGhafari MNierstrasz OScanniello GLo DSerebrenik A(2017)Exploiting type hints in method argument names to improve lightweight type inferenceProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1109/ICPC.2017.33(77-87)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICPC.2017.33
Milojković NGhafari MNierstrasz OScanniello GLo DSerebrenik A(2017)It's duck (typing) season!Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1109/ICPC.2017.10(312-315)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICPC.2017.10

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