Mon 26 Oct 2015 13:50 - 14:10 at Grand Station 5 - Programming Languages Papers Chair(s): Joshua Sunshine

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 categorize them using a thematic analysis methodology. We observed that even though some questions (22.94% of them) are related to practical problems (e.g., “how to fix this concurrency bug”), most of them (66.23%) are asking for help in the basics concepts of concurrent programming (e.g., “what is a mutex?”). Although most of the questions are related to basic concepts, such questions were created by well-experienced StackOveflow users. Curiously, we did not find any question about how to use concurrent programming techniques to improve application performance.

A Study on the Most Popular Questions About Concurrent Programming (plateau2015-pinto.pdf)255KiB

Mon 26 Oct

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

13:30 - 15:00
Programming Languages PapersPLATEAU at Grand Station 5
Chair(s): Joshua Sunshine Carnegie Mellon University
13:30
20m
Talk
A user study for comparing the programming efficiency of modifying executable multimodal interaction descriptions. A domain-specific language versus equivalent event-callback code
PLATEAU
Fredy Cuenca Hasselt University - tUL - iMinds, Jan Van den Bergh Hasselt University - tUL - iMinds, Kris Luyten Hasselt University - tUL - iMinds, Karin Coninx Hasselt University - tUL - iMinds
File Attached
13:50
20m
Talk
A Study on the Most Popular Questions About Concurrent Programming
PLATEAU
Gustavo Pinto UFPE, Weslley Torres Federal University of Pernambuco, Fernando Castor UFPE
File Attached
14:10
10m
Talk
Comparing Transitive to Intransitive Object Immutability
PLATEAU
Michael Coblenz Carnegie Mellon University, Joshua Sunshine Carnegie Mellon University, Brad A. Myers Carnegie Mellon University, Sam Weber Software Engineering Institute, Forrest Shull Software Engineering Institute
File Attached
14:20
13m
Talk
Is Functional Programming Better for Modularity?
PLATEAU
Ismael Figueroa Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile, Romain Robbes University of Chile
File Attached
14:33
13m
Talk
Operators and precedence in programming languages
PLATEAU
Najwani Razali Victoria University of Wellington, James Noble Victoria University of Wellington, Stuart Marshall Victoria University of Wellington
File Attached
14:46
13m
Talk
Some Usability Hypotheses for Verification
PLATEAU
David J. Pearce Victoria University of Wellington
File Attached