Exploring the Educational Benefits of Introducing Aspect-Oriented Programming Into a Programming Course

This paper explores the educational benefits of introducing the aspect-oriented programming paradigm into a programming course in a study on a sample of 75 undergraduate software engineering students. It discusses how using the aspect-oriented paradigm, in addition to the object-oriented programming paradigm, affects students' programs, their exam results, and their overall perception of the theoretically claimed benefits of aspect-oriented programming. The research methodology, consisting of automating the analysis of student-created computer programs, administering surveys, and collecting exam results, provided an objective measurement of the benefits of the paradigm for novice programmers, as well as evaluating their perception of its usefulness. The results show that the use of aspect-oriented programming as a supplement to object-oriented programming enhances the productivity of novice program code software engineering students and leads to increased understanding of theoretical concepts. Students readily accepted the new paradigm and recognized its benefits.

I. Introduction

Programming paradigms date back to the advent of modern computers. Even as early as the 1960s, computer scientists, among them Edsger Dijkstra, gave guidelines on how to do programming [1], [2]. These imperative programming postulates were extended by the popular object-oriented programming (OOP) and influenced the positioning of other programming paradigms, such as declarative programming, in the world of modern software engineering. Software engineering has the dynamism and flexibility to allow for the emergence of new paradigms targeted at filling the gaps in the day-to-day use of imperative, object-oriented, and declarative paradigms. The aspect-oriented programming (AOP) paradigm [3] was introduced as a complement to the object-oriented paradigm in order to improve the overall quality of programs. Logging, exception handling, and authorization checks are examples of tasks that are difficult to solve with OOP, but which can be elegantly solved with the AOP.