Design of an Empirical Study for Comparing the Usability of Concurrent Programming Languages

被引:10
作者
Nanz, Sebastian [1 ]
Torshizi, Faraz [2 ]
Pedroni, Michela [1 ]
Meyer, Bertrand [1 ]
机构
[1] Swiss Fed Inst Technol, Zurich, Switzerland
[2] Univ Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
来源
2011 FIFTH INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON EMPIRICAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING AND MEASUREMENT (ESEM 2011) | 2011年
基金
加拿大自然科学与工程研究理事会;
关键词
empirical study; concurrency; programming languages; usability;
D O I
10.1109/ESEM.2011.41
中图分类号
TP31 [计算机软件];
学科分类号
081202 ; 0835 ;
摘要
The recent turn towards multicore processing architectures has made concurrency an important part of mainstream software development. As a result, an increasing number of developers have to learn to write concurrent programs, a task that is known to be hard even for the expert. Language designers are therefore working on languages that promise to make concurrent programming "easier". However, the claim that a new language is more usable than another cannot be supported by purely theoretical considerations, but calls for empirical studies. In this paper, we present the design of a study to compare concurrent programming languages with respect to comprehending and debugging existing programs and writing correct new programs. A critical challenge for such a study is avoiding the bias that might be introduced during the training phase and when interpreting participants' solutions. We address these issues by the use of self-study material and an evaluation scheme that exposes any subjective decisions of the corrector, or eliminates them altogether. We apply our design to a comparison of two object-oriented languages for concurrency, multithreaded Java and SCOOP ( Simple Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming), in an academic setting. We obtain results in favor of SCOOP even though the study participants had previous training in writing multithreaded Java programs.
引用
收藏
页码:325 / 334
页数:10
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