On The Human Factors Impact of Polyglot Programming on Programmer Productivity

Polyglot programming is a common practice in modern software development. This practice is often considered useful to create software by allowing developers to use whichever language they consider most well suited for the different parts of their software. Despite this ubiquity of polyglot programming there is no empirical research into how this practice affects software developers and their productivity. In this dissertation, after reviewing the state of the art in programming language and linguistic research pertaining to the topic, this matter is investigated by way of two empirical studies with 109 and 171 participants solving programming tasks. Based on the findings, the design of a data management library, a common use-case for polyglot programming, is proposed broadly and then applied specifically to the language Quorum as a case study. The review of previous studies finds that there is a pattern of productivity gain that can be explained by the occurrence of type annotations in programming, which gives insight into how programmers comprehend code. Study results show that there is a significant improvement of programmer productivity when programmers are using polyglot programming in an embedded context (partial eta squared = 0.039) and that less experienced programmers do better in a group with more frequent, but less severe, switches, while more experienced developers perform better with less frequent but more complete switches between languages. A study on language switches on a file level shows that file level programming language switching has a clear negative impact on programmer productivity (partial eta squared = 0.059) and is most likely caused by the increased occurrence of errors when switching

An Empirical Study on The Impact of C++ Lambdas And Programmer Experience

Lambda functions have become prevalent in mainstream programming languages, as they are increasingly introduced to widely used object oriented programming languages such as Java and C++. Some in the scientific literature argue that this feature increases programmer productivity, ease of reading, and makes parallel programming easier. Others are less convinced, citing concerns that the use of lambdas makes debugging harder. This thesis describes the design, execution and results of an experiment to test the impact of using lambda functions compared to the iterator design pattern for iteration tasks, as a first step in evaluating these claims. The approach is a randomized controlled trial, which focuses on the percentage of tasks completed, number of compiler errors, the percentage of time to fix such errors, and the amount of time it takes to complete programming tasks correctly. The overall goal is to investigate, if lambda functions have an impact on the ability of developers to complete tasks, or the amount of time taken to complete them. Additionally, it is tested if developers introduce more errors while using lambda functions and if fixing errors takes them more time. Lastly, the impact of experience level on productivity is evaluated by comparing the performance of participants from different levels of experience with one-another. Participants were assigned one of five levels based on their progress in the computer science major. The five levels were freshman, sophomore, junior, senior and professional. The professional level was assigned to individuals out of school with 5 or more years of professional experience. Results show that the impact of using lambdas, as opposed to iterators, on the number of tasks completed was significant. The impact on time to completion, number of errors introduced during the experiment and times spent fixing errors were also found to be significant. The analysis of the difference between the different levels of experience also shows a significant difference. The percentage of time spent on fixing compilation errors was 56.37% for the lambda group while it was 44.2% for the control group with 3.5% of the variance being explained by the group difference. 45.7% of the variance in the sample was explained by the difference between the level of education. Therefore, this study suggests that earlier findings that student results are comparable with the results of professional developers are to be considered carefully

A Randomized Controlled Trial on the Impact of Polyglot Programming in a Database Context

Using more than one programming language in the same project is common practice. Often, additional languages might be introduced to projects to solve specific issues. While the practice is common, it is unclear whether it has an impact on developer productivity. In this paper, we present a pilot study investigating what happens when programmers switch between programming languages. The experiment is a repeated measures double-blind randomized controlled trial with 3 groups with various kinds of code switching in a database context. Results provide a rigorous testing methodology that can be replicated by us or others and a theoretical backing for why these effects might exist from the linguistics literature