A Comparative Study of the Usability of Two Object-oriented Concurrent Programming Languages

Concurrency has been rapidly gaining importance in general-purpose computing, causedby the recent turn towards multicore processing architectures. As a result, an increasingnumber of developers have to learn to write concurrent programs, a task that is known to behard even for the expert. Language designers are therefore working on languages that promiseto make concurrent programming “easier” than using traditional thread libraries. However,the claim that a new language is more usable than another cannot be supported by purelytheoretical considerations, but calls for empirical studies. In this paper, we present the designof a study to compare concurrent programming languages with respect to comprehendingand debugging existing programs and writing correct new programs. A critical challenge forsuch a study is avoiding the bias that might be introduced during the training phase andwhen interpreting participants’ solutions. We address these issues by the use of self-studymaterial and an evaluation scheme that exposes any subjective decisions of the corrector,or eliminates them altogether. We apply our design to a comparison of two object-orientedlanguages for concurrency, multithreaded Java and SCOOP (Simple Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming), in an academic setting. We obtain results in favor of SCOOP eventhough the study participants had previous training in Java Threads.