Overcoming language dichotomies

Abstract

Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we provide a roadmap of directions for future work. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Software notations and tools;

An Observational Study on React Native (RN) Questions on Stack Overflow (SO)

“…The interest toward mobile applications and their development has been steadily growing [2,3]. Mobile application development is considered to be unique from traditional software development, and it has a distinguished set of challenges [1,2,[12][13][14][15]. Despite RN's aim to ease the process of mobile application development, the utilization of the framework still demands overcoming some of the innate hurdles within the development of mobile application development, such as optimizing layout and power consumption [2,15].…”

“…Though the reliance on mobile applications is growing in popularity, with tremendous potential and opportunities at hand, mobile application development is not an easy feat [2,[9][10][11]. Mobile application development is considered to be distinct from traditional software system development, and it has its unique set of challenges [1,2,[12][13][14][15]. One of the core challenges that resides within mobile application development is the development of cross-platform applications.…”