Authors:
Omar Badreddin
1
;
Maged Elaasar
2
and
Wahab Hamou-Lhadj
3
Affiliations:
1
Northern Arizona University, United States
;
2
Carleton University, United States
;
3
Concordia University, Canada
Keyword(s):
UML, Model Driven Development, Alf, Object Orientation, Model Oriented Programming Languages.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
General-Purpose Modeling Languages and Standards
;
Languages, Tools and Architectures
;
Model-Driven Software Development
;
Reasoning about Models
;
Software Engineering
Abstract:
Action Languages represent an emerging paradigm where modeling abstractions are embedded in code to bridge the gap with visual models, such as UML models. The paradigm is gaining momentum, evident by the growing number of tools and standards that support this paradigm. In this paper, we report on a controlled ex-periment to assess the comprehensibility of those languages and compare it to that of object-oriented (OO) programming languages. We further report on the impact of also having access to the UML notation on the comprehensibility of those languages. Results suggest that action languages are significantly more comprehen-sible than traditional OO languages. Furthermore, there was not a significant improvement in comprehensibil-ity when the UML notation was used along with both OO and action language code. We conclude that action languages are a promising alternative to traditional OO languages for specifying details, yet seem to be as comprehensible as high-level visual models.