{"title":"Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools","authors":"Thomas D. Latoza, C. Anslow, Joshua Sunshine","doi":"10.1145/2846680","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2846680","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":213941,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114787153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
While it looks like controlled trials with human involvement are increasingly applied in software science, there are few explicitly documented community standards in regard to their design or approach. This leads to a number of problems: experimenters cannot be sure whether an experiment they perform does represent the current state-of-the-art, reviewers have no guidelines to check whether a critique they have in mind is valid or not, and readers from experiments have hardly any chance to check whether the results of an experiment they are reading should be taken seriously. This paper discusses the problem of missing community standards for empirical studies in computer science and makes a first proposal with respect to subjects, training, measurements, experimental designs, and documentation. The overall goal of this paper is to begin a discussion on this issue.
{"title":"On the need to define community agreements for controlled experiments with human subjects: a discussion paper","authors":"Stefan Hanenberg, A. Stefik","doi":"10.1145/2846680.2846692","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2846680.2846692","url":null,"abstract":"While it looks like controlled trials with human involvement are increasingly applied in software science, there are few explicitly documented community standards in regard to their design or approach. This leads to a number of problems: experimenters cannot be sure whether an experiment they perform does represent the current state-of-the-art, reviewers have no guidelines to check whether a critique they have in mind is valid or not, and readers from experiments have hardly any chance to check whether the results of an experiment they are reading should be taken seriously. This paper discusses the problem of missing community standards for empirical studies in computer science and makes a first proposal with respect to subjects, training, measurements, experimental designs, and documentation. The overall goal of this paper is to begin a discussion on this issue.","PeriodicalId":213941,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117206758","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Fredy Cuenca, J. V. D. Bergh, K. Luyten, K. Coninx
The present paper describes an empirical user study intended to compare the programming efficiency of our proposed domain-specific language versus a mainstream event language when it comes to modify multimodal interactions. By concerted use of observations, interviews, and standardized questionnaires, we managed to measure the completion rates, completion time, code testing effort, and perceived difficulty of the programming tasks along with the perceived usability and perceived learnability of the tool supporting our proposed language. Based on this experience, we propose some guidelines for designing comparative user studies of programming languages. The paper also discusses the considerations we took into account when designing a multimodal interaction description language that intends to be well regarded by its users.
{"title":"A user study for comparing the programming efficiency of modifying executable multimodal interaction descriptions: a domain-specific language versus equivalent event-callback code","authors":"Fredy Cuenca, J. V. D. Bergh, K. Luyten, K. Coninx","doi":"10.1145/2846680.2846686","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2846680.2846686","url":null,"abstract":"The present paper describes an empirical user study intended to compare the programming efficiency of our proposed domain-specific language versus a mainstream event language when it comes to modify multimodal interactions. By concerted use of observations, interviews, and standardized questionnaires, we managed to measure the completion rates, completion time, code testing effort, and perceived difficulty of the programming tasks along with the perceived usability and perceived learnability of the tool supporting our proposed language. Based on this experience, we propose some guidelines for designing comparative user studies of programming languages. The paper also discusses the considerations we took into account when designing a multimodal interaction description language that intends to be well regarded by its users.","PeriodicalId":213941,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools","volume":"AES-3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126489865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The idea of specifying and verifying software to eliminate errors has been studied extensively over the last three decades or more. Recent advances in automated theorem proving have given rise to a range of new verification tools being developed. Despite this, very little is known about the effect of using such tools on software development. In this paper, we present several verification-related usability hypotheses which we believe warrant further investigation. These hypotheses are based on observations from the literature, as well as our own experiences in developing and using the Whiley verification system.
{"title":"Some usability hypotheses for verification","authors":"David J. Pearce","doi":"10.1145/2846680.2846691","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2846680.2846691","url":null,"abstract":"The idea of specifying and verifying software to eliminate errors has been studied extensively over the last three decades or more. Recent advances in automated theorem proving have given rise to a range of new verification tools being developed. Despite this, very little is known about the effect of using such tools on software development. In this paper, we present several verification-related usability hypotheses which we believe warrant further investigation. These hypotheses are based on observations from the literature, as well as our own experiences in developing and using the Whiley verification system.","PeriodicalId":213941,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools","volume":"91 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115950347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Concurrent programming is notably known as a hard discipline. Over the last few years, great strides have been made in improving concurrent programming abstractions, techniques, and tools to ease concurrent programming practice. However, little effort has been placed on assessing what are the real-world problems faced by developers when writing concurrent applications. In this paper, we describe an empirical investigation of the top-250 most popular questions about concurrent programming on StackOverflow. We observed that even though some questions (22.94%) are related to practical problems (e.g., “how to fix this concurrency bug”), most of them (66.23%) are related to basic concepts (e.g., “what is a mutex?”), which were created by well- experienced StackOverflow users. Curiously, we did not find any question about how to use concurrent programming techniques to improve application performance.
{"title":"A study on the most popular questions about concurrent programming","authors":"G. Pinto, Weslley Torres, F. C. Filho","doi":"10.1145/2846680.2846687","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2846680.2846687","url":null,"abstract":"Concurrent programming is notably known as a hard discipline. Over the last few years, great strides have been made in improving concurrent programming abstractions, techniques, and tools to ease concurrent programming practice. However, little effort has been placed on assessing what are the real-world problems faced by developers when writing concurrent applications. In this paper, we describe an empirical investigation of the top-250 most popular questions about concurrent programming on StackOverflow. We observed that even though some questions (22.94%) are related to practical problems (e.g., “how to fix this concurrency bug”), most of them (66.23%) are related to basic concepts (e.g., “what is a mutex?”), which were created by well- experienced StackOverflow users. Curiously, we did not find any question about how to use concurrent programming techniques to improve application performance.","PeriodicalId":213941,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122127253","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
An incorrect understanding of operators and precedence can create bugs in programs. The purpose of this study is to explore programmers understanding, interpretation and perception of operators and precedence issues. Parentheses have the highest precedence in programming languages. So, the important of parentheses in expressions will be tested. The findings may lead to an improvement to rules for operators and precedence in programming languages. The findings will also provide both theoretical analyses and guidelines for developers and language designers.
{"title":"Operators and precedence in programming languages","authors":"Najwani Razali, J. Noble, S. Marshall","doi":"10.1145/2846680.2846690","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2846680.2846690","url":null,"abstract":"An incorrect understanding of operators and precedence can create bugs in programs. The purpose of this study is to explore programmers understanding, interpretation and perception of operators and precedence issues. Parentheses have the highest precedence in programming languages. So, the important of parentheses in expressions will be tested. The findings may lead to an improvement to rules for operators and precedence in programming languages. The findings will also provide both theoretical analyses and guidelines for developers and language designers.","PeriodicalId":213941,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools","volume":"150 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116348948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The majority of software is still written using text-based programming languages. With today's large, high-resolution color displays, developers have devised their own "folk design" methodologies to exploit these advances. As software becomes more and more critical to everyday life, supporting developers in rapidly producing and revising code accurately should be a priority. We consider how layout, typefaces, anti-aliasing, syntax highlighting, and semantic highlighting might impact developer efficiency and accuracy.
{"title":"Understanding the effects of code presentation","authors":"Jason T. Jacques, P. Kristensson","doi":"10.1145/2846680.2846685","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2846680.2846685","url":null,"abstract":"The majority of software is still written using text-based programming languages. With today's large, high-resolution color displays, developers have devised their own \"folk design\" methodologies to exploit these advances. As software becomes more and more critical to everyday life, supporting developers in rapidly producing and revising code accurately should be a priority. We consider how layout, typefaces, anti-aliasing, syntax highlighting, and semantic highlighting might impact developer efficiency and accuracy.","PeriodicalId":213941,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools","volume":"504 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116171720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Michael J. Coblenz, Joshua Sunshine, B. Myers, Sam Weber, F. Shull
Many programming languages provide features that express restrictions on which data structures can be changed. For example, C++ includes const and Java includes final. Languages that are in widespread use typically provide non-transitive immutability: when a reference is specified to be immutable or read-only, the object referenced can still reference mutable structures. However, some languages, particularly research languages, provide transitive immutability, in which immutable objects can only reference other immutable objects (with some exceptions). We are designing a lab study of programmers to elucidate the differences in programmer effectiveness between these two approaches.
{"title":"Comparing transitive to non-transitive object immutability","authors":"Michael J. Coblenz, Joshua Sunshine, B. Myers, Sam Weber, F. Shull","doi":"10.1145/2846680.2846688","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2846680.2846688","url":null,"abstract":"Many programming languages provide features that express restrictions on which data structures can be changed. For example, C++ includes const and Java includes final. Languages that are in widespread use typically provide non-transitive immutability: when a reference is specified to be immutable or read-only, the object referenced can still reference mutable structures. However, some languages, particularly research languages, provide transitive immutability, in which immutable objects can only reference other immutable objects (with some exceptions). We are designing a lab study of programmers to elucidate the differences in programmer effectiveness between these two approaches.","PeriodicalId":213941,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126563195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 1989 John Hughes published an influential position paper entitled Why Functional Programming Matters. The article extolls the virtues of lazy functional programming by developing several examples: the Newton-Rhapson squares root method, numerical differentiation and integration, and an alpha-beta minimax search. A main conclusion of that work is that higher-order functions and lazy evaluation significantly contribute to modularity. We have found that recent articles from 2010 to 2014 cite Hughes' work as seminal work supporting that functional programming is, in general, good for modularity. We believe this reflects an unstated hypothesis in part of the research community: functional programming is inherently better at modularity than other paradigms such as typical procedural and object-oriented programming. To the best of our knowledge there are no (large-scale) empirical evaluations of this characteristic. We discuss the influence of Why Functional Programming Matters on current beliefs regarding the advantages of functional programming, the recent citations that intrigues us, and provide a small experiment on the GHC Haskell compiler, suggesting the existence of modularity issues in it.
{"title":"Is functional programming better for modularity?","authors":"Ismael Figueroa, R. Robbes","doi":"10.1145/2846680.2846689","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2846680.2846689","url":null,"abstract":"In 1989 John Hughes published an influential position paper entitled Why Functional Programming Matters. The article extolls the virtues of lazy functional programming by developing several examples: the Newton-Rhapson squares root method, numerical differentiation and integration, and an alpha-beta minimax search. A main conclusion of that work is that higher-order functions and lazy evaluation significantly contribute to modularity. We have found that recent articles from 2010 to 2014 cite Hughes' work as seminal work supporting that functional programming is, in general, good for modularity. We believe this reflects an unstated hypothesis in part of the research community: functional programming is inherently better at modularity than other paradigms such as typical procedural and object-oriented programming. To the best of our knowledge there are no (large-scale) empirical evaluations of this characteristic. We discuss the influence of Why Functional Programming Matters on current beliefs regarding the advantages of functional programming, the recent citations that intrigues us, and provide a small experiment on the GHC Haskell compiler, suggesting the existence of modularity issues in it.","PeriodicalId":213941,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools","volume":"79 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117229263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Developers commonly ask detailed and domain-specific questions about the software systems they are developing and maintaining. Integrated development environments (IDEs) form an essential category of tools for developing software that should support software engineering decision making. Unfortunately, rigid and generic IDEs that focus on low-level programming tasks, that promote code rather than data, and that suppress customization, offer limited support for informed decision making during software development. We propose to improve decision making within IDEs by moving from generic to context-aware IDEs through moldable tools. In this paper, we promote the idea of moldable tools, illustrate it with concrete examples, and discuss future research directions.
{"title":"Towards moldable development tools","authors":"Andrei Chis, Oscar Nierstrasz, Tudor Gîrba","doi":"10.1145/2846680.2846684","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2846680.2846684","url":null,"abstract":"Developers commonly ask detailed and domain-specific questions about the software systems they are developing and maintaining. Integrated development environments (IDEs) form an essential category of tools for developing software that should support software engineering decision making. Unfortunately, rigid and generic IDEs that focus on low-level programming tasks, that promote code rather than data, and that suppress customization, offer limited support for informed decision making during software development. We propose to improve decision making within IDEs by moving from generic to context-aware IDEs through moldable tools. In this paper, we promote the idea of moldable tools, illustrate it with concrete examples, and discuss future research directions.","PeriodicalId":213941,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128357295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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