Toward Improving Industrial Adoption: The Choice of Programming Languages and Development Environments

While promising software engineering approaches are proposed every day, only few are adapted by professional developers. There are many potential reasons for this, such as, problems in identifying helpful approaches, missing tools, or lacking practical relevance. With our current research, we are concerned to improve the knowledge transfer from research to practice. In this paper, we discuss the impact of development environments and programming languages on knowledge transfer – considering that many scientific approaches and tools are interesting for professional developers, but rarely adopted by them. We base our discussion mainly on our personal experiences with industry-academia collaborations. To determine whether these experiences also apply to other developers, we additionally conducted a survey with 89 participants from academia and industry. The first results of our on-going work indicate a gap between the development environments and programming languages that are supported or used by researchers and those that are applied in industry. Based on our results, we describe initial discussions that can help to improve collaborations between industry and research.