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

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-29-2019

Publication Title

9th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU 2018)

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

First page number:

1

Last page number:

8

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Human-Factors; Randomized Controlled Trial; Polyglot Programming

Disciplines

Computer Sciences | Physical Sciences and Mathematics | Programming Languages and Compilers

Language

English

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