Will Crichton

Will Crichton: Rust for Everyone!

Will Crichton

Will Creighton's research at the Cognitive Engineering Lab applies human-centered design and formal cognitive theories to address fundamental learning and debugging barriers in Rust. By developing three core tools—Aquascope for visualizing ownership permissions, Argus for interactive trait solver trees, and Flow History for precise program slicing—the team achieved a 9-point score increase in learner assessments and a threefold speedup in error localization during user studies. Future efforts are now directed toward resolving async/await complexities and promoting extensible IDE frameworks like CodeMirror to further advance a scientific approach to programming language design.