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ICSE 2023
Sun 14 - Sat 20 May 2023 Melbourne, Australia
Thu 18 May 2023 13:45 - 14:00 at Meeting Room 103 - Programming languages Chair(s): Jean-Guy Schneider

Developing a software project using multiple languages together has been a dominant practice for years. Yet it remains unclear what issues developers encounter during the development, which challenges cause the issues, and what solutions developers receive. In this paper, we aim to answer these questions via a study on developer discussions on Stack Overflow. By manually analyzing 586 highly relevant posts spanning 14 years, we observed a large variety (11 categories) of issues, dominated by those with interfacing and data handling among different languages. Behind these issues, we found that a major challenge developers faced is the diversity and complexity in multilingual code building and interoperability. Another key challenge lies in developers’ lack of particular technical background on the diverse features of various languages (e.g., threading and memory management mechanisms). Meanwhile, Stack Overflow itself served as a key source of solutions to these challenges—the majority (73%) of the posts received accepted answers eventually, and most in a week (36.5% within 24 hours and 25% in the next 6 days). Based on our findings on these issues, challenges, and solutions, we provide actionable insights and suggestions for both multi-language software researchers and developers.

Thu 18 May

Displayed time zone: Hobart change

13:45 - 15:15
13:45
15m
Talk
Demystifying Issues, Challenges, and Solutions for Multilingual Software Development
Technical Track
Haoran Yang Washington State University, Weile Lian Washington State University, Shaowei Wang University of Manitoba, Haipeng Cai Washington State University
Pre-print
14:00
15m
Talk
Testability Refactoring in Pull Requests: Patterns and Trends
Technical Track
Pavel Reich University of Hamburg, Walid Maalej University of Hamburg
Pre-print
14:15
15m
Talk
Usability-Oriented Design of Liquid Types for Java
Technical Track
Catarina Gamboa CMU and LASIGE, Paulo Canelas Carnegie Mellon University, Christopher Steven Timperley Carnegie Mellon University, Alcides Fonseca University of Lisbon
DOI
14:30
15m
Talk
A Theorem Proving Approach to Programming Language Semantics
SEET - Software Engineering Education and Training
Subhajit Roy IIT Kanpur
14:45
7m
Talk
RIdiom: Automatically Refactoring Non-idiomatic Python Code with Pythonic Idioms
DEMO - Demonstrations
zejun zhang Australian National University, Zhenchang Xing CSIRO’s Data61; Australian National University, Xiwei (Sherry) Xu CSIRO’s Data61, Liming Zhu CSIRO’s Data61
14:52
7m
Talk
An Empirical Study of Data Constraint Implementations in Java
Journal-First Papers
Juan Manuel Florez CQSE America, Laura Moreno CQSE America, Zenong Zhang The University of Texas at Dallas, Shiyi Wei University of Texas at Dallas, Andrian Marcus University of Texas at Dallas
14:59
7m
Talk
Learning To Predict User-Defined Types
Journal-First Papers
Kevin Jesse University of California at Davis, USA, Prem Devanbu University of California at Davis, Anand Ashok Sawant University of California, Davis