An Empirical Study of Experienced Programmers’ Acquisition of New Programming Languages

Experienced programmers often need to use online resources to pick up new programming languages. However, we lack a comprehensive understanding of which resources programmers find most valuable and utilize most often. In this paper, we study how experienced programmers learn Rust, a systems programming language with comprehensive documentation, extensive example code, an active online community, and descriptive compiler errors. We develop a task that requires understanding the Rust-specific language concepts of mutability and ownership, in addition to learning Rust syntax. Our results show that users spend 42% of online time viewing example code and that programmers appreciate the Rust Enhanced package’s in-line compiler errors, choosing to refresh every 30.6 seconds after first discovering this feature. We did not find any significant correlations between the resources used and the total task time or the learning outcomes. We discuss these results in light of design implications for language developers seeking to create resources to encourage usage and adoption by experienced programmers. Author