Julia Language Use
New languages come with lists of features touted as tools to help programmers be productive and solve problems. In Julia multimethods and optional type annotations are two such features. However there is little work on how programmers actually use the tools a language gives them. Understanding how programmers leverage language features over the course of developing software and the extent and context of feature use can provide insight into what Julia does well as a language and where it or future languages could improve. I will continue developing an analysis library for Julia code and apply that library to find out how users approach writing Julia code.

I am studying computer science and am interested in computer systems engineering. The Julia group provides a unique opportunity for the study of programming language use because we can look at code by real users (the Julia ecosystem has hundreds of packages written by users around the world) but the language itself is still growing and changing so understanding its use so far can be of real help.