Students face several challenges when learning computer programming languages, a central topic to acquire programming skills. While those challenges that present a predominantly technical nature have been intensely studied by researchers along the years, the ones that are concerned with qualitative, and personal aspects have not. Affinity to a programming language is one of the many personal factors that may contribute to surpass these qualitative aspects that describe the difficulties that students face. From this point-of-view, this paper presents a proposal for treating and studying programmers' affinity to programming languages as an important factor for learning computer programming. It also reports a preliminary questionnaire conducted on a master’s degree class at Universidade do Minho that showed that affinity may have a broader relation to learning computer programming than anticipated. Finally, a set of relevant questions are stated to compose a future inquiry aimed at deepening the knowledge on the affinity between programmers and languages, paving the way for following research.
@InProceedings{costaneto_et_al:OASIcs.ICPEC.2021.3, author = {Costa Neto, Alvaro and Ara\'{u}jo, Cristiana and Pereira, Maria Jo\~{a}o Varanda and Henriques, Pedro Rangel}, title = {{Programmers' Affinity to Languages}}, booktitle = {Second International Computer Programming Education Conference (ICPEC 2021)}, pages = {3:1--3:7}, series = {Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-194-8}, ISSN = {2190-6807}, year = {2021}, volume = {91}, editor = {Henriques, Pedro Rangel and Portela, Filipe and Queir\'{o}s, Ricardo and Sim\~{o}es, Alberto}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.ICPEC.2021.3}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-142192}, doi = {10.4230/OASIcs.ICPEC.2021.3}, annote = {Keywords: Computer programming, Programming Languages, Affinity, Education, Learning} }
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