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An Empirical Study on Reactive Programming

Dinser, Moritz (2021)
An Empirical Study on Reactive Programming.
Technische Universität Darmstadt
doi: 10.26083/tuprints-00019901
Bachelor Thesis, Primary publication, Publisher's Version

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Item Type: Bachelor Thesis
Type of entry: Primary publication
Title: An Empirical Study on Reactive Programming
Language: English
Referees: Mezini, Prof. Dr. Mira ; Mogk, M.Sc. Ragnar
Date: 2021
Place of Publication: Darmstadt
Collation: 43 Seiten
DOI: 10.26083/tuprints-00019901
Abstract:

In recent years, interactive applications have increased in popularity. However, due to the lack of fitting programming abstractions in this domain, developing these applications is challenging. While multiple reactive programming languages have been proposed addressing these challenges, empirical studies evaluating the usability of these languages are still uncommon. With this study we present an empirical evaluation of the usability and intuitivity of one of these proposed languages: REScala, a Scala library for functional reactive programming. The goal of our study is to validate claimed advantages of REScala, ascertain what improvements to the language could be beneficial and how these improvements could be achieved. During the study we observed 9 participants working with the REScala library following the think aloud approach. Our results show that after overcoming initial challenges, participants showed a quick learning effect and, in the end, understood the basic concepts of REScala and wrote valid REScala code. We therefore conclude that REScala doesn't present more difficulties compared to learning any other new programming concept while providing multiple benefits for reactive programming, such as increased composability, enforced consistency and fault tolerance. Based on our results, we also provide a set of improvements, we observed helpful, in order to overcome initial challenges when learning REScala.

Status: Publisher's Version
URN: urn:nbn:de:tuda-tuprints-199016
Classification DDC: 000 Generalities, computers, information > 004 Computer science
Divisions: 20 Department of Computer Science > Software Technology
Date Deposited: 25 Nov 2021 13:32
Last Modified: 25 Nov 2021 13:32
URI: https://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/id/eprint/19901
PPN: 489262082
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