On 12/28/2017 2:54 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
Clearly you are missing the point I am making, which clearly must be my fault for bad expression.
Whether it's your fault or mine, I apparently have no idea what you mean by the phrase "psychology based design".
Also clear it is not worth progressing this debate.
Not necessarily true. I have always been interested in human factors design, going back to my experience designing airplane parts and talking with the cockpit design engineers.
A fun example is the warning horns in the cockpit. One was added, I think for stall warning. It turned out to be remarkably effective. So they added horns for other emergencies, each with a distinct sound so the pilot could distinguish them.
But it turned out, in a high stress situation, the pilot would get confused associating the sound with what just went wrong, and would take the wrong corrective action. Boeing then had the brilliant (and obvious in hindsight, as these things so often are) of replacing the horn sounds with words. So the stall warning horn becomes "stall, stall" (I forgot the exact words for it). Problem solved!
With programming language design, I'm pretty interested in why programmers make the mistakes they do, and if the propensity for making those mistakes can be blunted by altering the design of the language. There's a lot of that in D. (I enjoy reading articles about what static checkers do, and articles that collect statistics on types of bugs.)
