Tomaž Kosar¹, Nuno Oliveira², Marjan Mernik¹, Maria João Varanda Pereira³, Matej Črepinšek¹, Daniela da Cruz² and Pedro Rangel Henriques²

¹ University of Maribor, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Smetanova 17, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia
{tomaz.kosar, marjan.mernik, matej.crepinsek}@uni-mb.si

² University of Minho - Department of Computer Science
Campus de Gualtar, 4715-057, Braga, Portugal
{nunooliveira, danieladacruz, prh}@di.uminho.pt

³ Polytechnic Institute of Bragança
Campus de Sta. Apolónia, Apartado 134 - 5301-857, Bragança, Portugal
mjoao@ipb.pt

Abstract. Many domain-specific languages, that try to bring feasible alternatives for existing solutions, with a purpose to simplify programmers work, have come up in recent years, Although, these little languages seem to be easy to use, there is an open issue whether they bring advantages in comparison to the application libraries, which are the most commonly used implementation approach. In this work, we present an experiment, which was carried out to compare such a domain-specific language with a comparable application library. The experiment was conducted with 36 programmers, who have answered a questionnaire on both implementation approaches. The questionnaire runs on more than 100 pages. For a domain-specific language and the application library, the same problem domain has been used – construction of graphical user interfaces. In terms of a domain-specific language, XAML has been used and C# Forms for the application library. A cognitive dimension framework has been used for a comparison between XAML and C# Forms.