Ruven Brooks said:
> ... I would argue that laboratory studies of programmer
> performance underestimate the differences seen in the real
> world by one or two orders of magnitude.
> Both of these cases also illustrate that substantial
> amounts of programming knowledge is above the level
> of the individual programming language constructs.
That's very true. So lets pose a hypothesis about the importance
of what we know in this context: I suggest that academic research
could be conducted in proportion to the size of the effect that
it will have in industry or society.
Industrial software productivity is affected by training
of the engineers, contextual knowledge, project management,
commercial practice etc., far more than it is affected by the
usability of the programming language. Let's say a
500-to-1 ratio.
So this would suggest (according to my hypothesis) that there
should be 500 schools that do research in engineering, project
management, software design, industrial management, for every one
that does research in the usability of programming languages.
Hey! That *is* about the ratio worldwide - so I guess we've got
the balance about right.
There are just a few people out in the world who design
programming languages for a living. I used to be one of them,
and that's how I met researchers in psychology of programming.
They were doing research relevant to my work, so that was a
great help to me. I was under no illusions about the importance
of my work - I knew that many other people were doing things
that would have far more effect on programmer productivity. But
someone has to design programming languages, and we may as well
make our decisions based on scientific methods rather than naive
assumptions. Isn't that why we have this discussion list? I
think we all know that there are other things in the world far
more important than our research topics.
Alan
--
Alan Blackwell Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/afb21/ Phone: +44 (0) 1223 334418
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