Performance analysis of SCOOP programs
Journal of Systems and Software
Why do scala developers mix the actor model with other concurrency models?
ECOOP'13 Proceedings of the 27th European conference on Object-Oriented Programming
Concurrent object-oriented development with behavioral design patterns
ECSA'13 Proceedings of the 7th European conference on Software Architecture
Examining the expert gap in parallel programming
Euro-Par'13 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Parallel Processing
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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.