Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Proactive Empirical Assessment of New Language Feature Adoption via
  Automated Refactoring: The Case of Java 8 Default Methods   Programming languages and platforms improve over time, sometimes resulting in
new language features that offer many benefits. However, despite these
benefits, developers may not always be willing to adopt them in their projects
for various reasons. In this paper, we describe an empirical study where we
assess the adoption of a particular new language feature. Studying how
developers use (or do not use) new language features is important in
programming language research and engineering because it gives designers
insight into the usability of the language to create meaning programs in that
language. This knowledge, in turn, can drive future innovations in the area.
Here, we explore Java 8 default methods, which allow interfaces to contain
(instance) method implementations.
  Default methods can ease interface evolution, make certain ubiquitous design
patterns redundant, and improve both modularity and maintainability. A focus of
this work is to discover, through a scientific approach and a novel technique,
situations where developers found these constructs useful and where they did
not, and the reasons for each. Although several studies center around assessing
new language features, to the best of our knowledge, this kind of construct has
not been previously considered.
  Despite their benefits, we found that developers did not adopt default
methods in all situations. Our study consisted of submitting pull requests
introducing the language feature to 19 real-world, open source Java projects
without altering original program semantics. This novel assessment technique is
proactive in that the adoption was driven by an automatic refactoring approach
rather than waiting for developers to discover and integrate the feature
themselves. In this way, we set forth best practices and patterns of using the
language feature effectively earlier rather than later and are able to possibly
guide (near) future language evolution. We foresee this technique to be useful
in assessing other new language features, design patterns, and other
programming idioms.

10
The categories of this paper are: q-bio
25
The categories of this paper are: patt-sol
7
The categories of this paper are: hep-th
8
The categories of this paper are: hep-ex
15
The categories of this paper are: nucl-ex
0
The categories of this paper are: hep-ph
20
The categories of this paper are: acc-phys
3
The categories of this paper are: physics
16
The categories of this paper are: stat
2
The categories of this paper are: math
4
The categories of this paper are: cond-mat
23
The categories of this paper are: solv-int
33
The categories of this paper are: plasm-ph
31
The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
19
The categories of this paper are: eess
37
The categories of this paper are: supr-con