Abstrakt
A variety of agent programming languages have been proposed in the literature but only few comparative studies have be en performed to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these languages. In order to gain a better understanding of the programming features and the use of these features by programmers it is imperative to perform studies on various programming tasks in these languages.
Such studies advance our knowledge of the benefits of using agent-oriented languages and may contribute positively to the evolution of these languages. In this paper we report on a study that compares the performance of programmers on tasks that use the agent programming frameworks Goal and POSH.
The aim of the study was to investigate any differences in usability of the frameworks as well as to study differences between novice and more advanced programmers using either framework. As POSH requires Java programming experience, we expected novice POSH programmers to perform better on the tasks than novice Goal programmers whereas we hypothesized this difference would not be observed between more advanced programmers.
However, results suggest that there is no significant difference for the given tasks between both frameworks. They do suggest that general experience and tooling support is important though.
Analysis of the tasks and the observations made about the use of the frameworks, moreover, suggests that the experimental design can be adapted in such a way that differences in usability of the frameworks can be established.