Stefan Hanenberg

Empirical Evaluation of Programming Language Constructs

Why a radical change in programming language research is necessary, why it does not happen, and how it could happen

Abstract: The discipline of programming language design is a field, which invents new language constructs and provides implementations for such constructs. The general goal is to provide means to developers to express themselves easier or more efficient, or to have constructs that run faster on machines. While the topic of “running fast on machines” is well-addressed, the whole topic of human interaction plays only a minor role in programming language design. This talk gives an overview of the problem of not addressing human factors in language design, discusses why human factors are still not addressed and gives possible solutions for this problem.

Bio: Stefan Hanenberg received a PhD in the area of aspect-oriented software development and works since 2006 as a lecturer for the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. His main research interest is the empirical evaluation of programming language constructs and in particular in the empirical evaluation of static and dynamic type systems.