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An Empirical Study on Reactive Programming

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

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Item Type: Bachelor Thesis
Status: Publisher's Version
Title: An Empirical Study on Reactive Programming
Language: English
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.

Place of Publication: Darmstadt
Collation: 43 Seiten
Classification DDC: 000 Allgemeines, Informatik, Informationswissenschaft > 004 Informatik
Divisions: 20 Department of Computer Science > Software Technology
Date Deposited: 25 Nov 2021 13:32
Last Modified: 25 Nov 2021 13:32
DOI: 10.26083/tuprints-00019901
URN: urn:nbn:de:tuda-tuprints-199016
Referees: Mezini, Prof. Dr. Mira ; Mogk, M.Sc. Ragnar
URI: https://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/id/eprint/19901
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