Title: Re: PPIG discuss: Slips in programming practice
Yeliz,
What you are referring to is Tacit Knowledge. It has been studied in the design literature. Also, Andersons production compilation process, and how experts cannot recall how something is done, but can do it fit in.
Mike
On 3/16/06 10:20 PM, Yeliz Eseryel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Sarah,
This is definitely an interesting area. In fact, your quotes are more about how experts and novices compare to each other rather than literature about slips. So I will make a few comments about that.
I've also read/heard about expert behavior that is similar to what Adelson(1984) said: Experts seem to solve problems and provide answers, and yet, when asked about how they arrived at these answers, they don't seem to be able to explain exactly how. (The underlying assumption here, is that they still outperform novices). I am trying to give references for this phenomenon, but I can't think of it. This idea is prevalent in the expert studies as well as in management literature. In fact some popular management readings mentioned the managerial intuition-which emphazised that when faced with problems, the first decision that experts make tended to be the correct one. In reality, (my take on this is that), it doesn't have anything to do with intuition, rather, most likely, it is something to do with the ability of experts to abstract the situations, and then find within their experiences a matching experience and then apply lessons learned from the previous experience-- in a vacuum...
Anyway, although I don't know much about the literature about this within the programming practice, I would think looking at the following literature might help you find things that are relevant enough that you can apply them to the programming context:
--Expert-Novice Studies
-- Problem solving literature (especially complex problem solving, ill structured problem solving etc)
Anders Ericsson has studied experts in a great variety of contexts (such as chess players, violinists, etc) and has very interesting findings
I hope this helps.
Yeliz.
On 3/16/06, Sarah Mount [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi y'all,
Does anyone know of literature about slips (unconscious mistakes) in
programming practice?
I'm aware of Adelson's work in this area (BibTeX follows below). As I
recall, Adelson (1981) found that expert programmers chunk up
(abstract) code and don't follow all the details, whereas novices
chunk down (concretize) and don't see abstract structures so clearly.
This probably rings bells with everyone's teaching experiences.
Adelson (1984) then found that novices out-perform experts in
answering concrete questions about program understanding but perform
similarly to experts when answering abstract questions. This perhaps
suggests (or confirms) why experts make mistakes in the detail of
programming -- their mental model has already abstracted away a whole
bunch of tricky stuff.
Can anyone do better? It seems like such an obvious (and interesting)
area of study that I'm sure I'm missing some obvious literature
somewhere ...
Very many thanks,
Sarah
@Article{Adelson81,
author = {Adelson, B.},
title = {Problem solving and the development of abstract categories
in programming languages},
journal = {Memory and Cognition},
year = {1981},
volume = {9},
pages = {422-433},
}
@Article{Adelson84,
author = {Adelson, B.},
title = {When Novices Surpass Experts: How the difficulty of a task
may increase with expertise},
journal = {Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and
Cognition},
year = {1984},
volume = {10},
number = {3},
pages = {483-495},
month = jul,
note = {Reprinted in Human Factors in Software Development (2nd ed.);
Bill Curtis (ed.). 1985. IEEE Computer Society Press:
Washington, DC. 55-67.},
}
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