An empirical study on program comprehension with reactive programming

Starting from the first investigations with strictly functional languages, reactive programming has been proposed as THE programming paradigm for reactive applications. The advantages of designs based on this style over designs based on the Observer design pattern have been studied for a long time. Over the years, researchers have enriched reactive languages with more powerful abns, embedded these abstractions into mainstream languages – including object-oriented languages – and applied reactive programming to several domains, like GUIs, animations, Web applications, robotics, and sensor networks. However, an important assumption behind this line of research – that, beside other advantages, reactive programming makes a wide class of otherwise cumbersome applications more comprehensible – has never been evaluated. In this paper, we present the design and the results of the first empirical study that evaluates the effect of reactive programming on comprehensibility compared to...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: SE
• Authors: Guido Salvaneschi, Sven Amann, Sebastian Proksch, Mira Mezini
• Keywords: SE 2016, Software Engineering