My Research
My doctoral research is driven by a central question:
How can the development and validation of a unified formal framework, based on an atomic decomposition of programming paradigms, establish a quantitative measure of inter-language collaboration and found a new pedagogical approach for teaching programming concepts?
To answer this question, my work is organized into three main research axes.
Research Axes
This foundational axis seeks to identify the minimal, independent “atomic concepts” that constitute programming paradigms and to formalize them within a coherent mathematical framework.
- State of the Art: The first step is to analyze existing formalisms and taxonomies for classifying programming languages to identify their limitations in terms of conceptual granularity.
- Contribution: My main contribution here is to define a set of conceptual primitives that allow for a minimal and orthogonal reconstruction of paradigms, with formal guarantees of their properties.
This work is grounded in a systematic literature review (SLR) that synthesizes 74 primary studies on this topic. The results of this SLR are detailed in a paper currently under review.
- Vandeloise, M. (2025). Towards a unified framework for programming paradigms: A systematic review of classification formalisms and methodological foundations. Submitted to Journal of Object Technology.
This axis explores how the formal framework can be used to define a quantitative metric (the Inter-Language Collaboration Metric, or LCM) to evaluate the conceptual compatibility between languages.
- State of the Art: This involves reviewing current technical and empirical approaches for evaluating and managing interoperability in multilingual software systems.
- Contribution: The goal is to translate the formal model of paradigmatic compatibility into a quantitative metric and to design an experimental protocol to validate its correlation with integration difficulties observed in practice.
As a first exploration of this research question, I have developed a formal definition of this metric and conducted a preliminary validation. This work is detailed in a paper currently under review:
- Vandeloise, M., Yernaux, G., & Vanhoof, W. (2025). Measuring Paradigmatic and Inter-Language Collaboration: A Formal Framework for Conceptual Compatibility in Software Engineering. Submitted to The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming.
This final axis applies the formal, hierarchical decomposition of paradigms to design new pedagogical strategies, such as Concept-Based Learning.
- State of the Art: This requires identifying the cognitive difficulties and documented misconceptions students face when learning complex paradigms like object-oriented programming.
- Contribution: The objective is to transpose the formal structure of a paradigm into a sequential teaching strategy that aligns the learning path with fundamental conceptual dependencies, aiming to reduce cognitive load.
This research theme directly informs my supervision of Master’s theses that develop and evaluate educational tools.
- Supervised Master’s Theses:
- Exploitation of Language Models (LLMs) for the Evaluation of Student Feedback during Peer Code Reviews by Rosny Anderson Fodja Kouanga (2025).
- Dynamic Visualization of the Stack and Heap: Development of an Educational Java Plugin in IntelliJ by Matteo Devigne & Ilyas El Hafid (2025).
Next Steps & Future Work
My immediate future work involves conducting two new Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) to establish a comprehensive state of the art for:
- Axis 2: Reviewing current technical and empirical approaches for evaluating and managing interoperability in multilingual software systems.
- Axis 3: Documenting the cognitive difficulties and misconceptions in the literature on learning complex programming paradigms.