Pete Hornsby writes:
|I'd really distinguish EUP from 'professional' programming by the
idea that
|EUP programs are typically single-user and standalone; there is no
notion
|of sharing the program with someone else, it is just a convenient
means of
|getting a job done.
Well, in Bonnie Nardi's studies of EUP, especially the spreadsheet
stuff, almost everyone she studied using spreadsheets was sharing
their results (the actual spreadsheet -- not just the numbers) with
others. So I don't think that's a valid distinction.
|
|I think there are definite limits on how much easier EUP can become.
|Although I have expressed the view above of a more appropriate system
|creation environment making the task easier for the human, the
question
|then arises of the number of environments that would be needed to
help the
|user fulfill all possible tasks - and I don't believe this is a
realistic
|scenario. I would however suggest that creating 'overlays' for
traditional
|programming languages might be beneficial. Java Studio was one such
idea
|which looked promising for a while, but was disontinued.
|
Having had some involvement with Java Studio, our usability tests
never showed that it lowered the barriers for non programmers. It was
often a fast way for programmers to do certain tasks (especially if
there were existing components to do the "meat" of the task), but
non-programmers needed to understand all the nuances of Java
programming (other than method names, perhaps) and some additional
nuances of about order of execution in a language that is pretending
to have no order, and what is required for a particular node to
"fire". This isn't proof that the overlay approach won't work (but
when we looked into ways to improve Java Studio in that direction, it
was going to be a real challenge), but it certainly can't be used as
evidence that it will work.
Robin Jeffries
