In Software Engineering, technology transfer has been faced as a peer to peer problem, concerning only the adoption and innovation agents. This approach works well when one is just seeking the adoption of a technology by a specific client, but it can not solve a common problem that is the adoption of new technologies by a large mass of potential new users. In wider context, it no longer makes sense to focus on peer to peer transfer. A new way of looking at the problem is necessary. The diffusion of innovations is more natural when it is treated as a spread of information in a community, similar to that observed in epidemics. This work proposes a paradigm shift to show that the adoption of programming languages can be formally treated as an epidemic. This shift of focus allows the dynamics of adoption of programming languages to be mathematically modeled as such, defining models that explain the communities' behavior when adopting programming languages, and allows some forecast to be made.

Helaine Lins

Papers

Programming Language Adoption as an Epidemiological Phenomenon