Ruven,
>First, let me note that even a factor of 4-5 for differences in programmer
>performance is already substantially greater than almost any other human
>skill. If one choose a sample of first year college students at the same
>university, one would be unlikely to uncover a difference that large in
>short term memory span. The only skills in which
>one sees that large a difference are highly learned ones, such as reading.
Programming is a learned performance.
People have been trained to be able to remember very long, 100 or so, sequences
of digits, 'Expert performance, its structure and acquisition' KA Ericsson &
N Charness, American Psychologist, August 1994.
>Second, I would argue that laboratory studies of programmer performance
>underestimate
>the differences seen in the real world by one or two orders of
>magnitude. Consider the following thought experiments.
In the real world few program are written from scratch. The difference between
newcomers and experienced staff on an existing project was around a factor
of 2-4 in 'Understanding and addressing the essential costs of evolving
systems',
Davison, Mand, Opdyke, Bell Labs Technical Journal Apr-June 2000.
>Both of these cases also illustrate that substantial amounts of
programming knowledge is >above the level of the individual programming
language constructs.
Programmers with experience in an application domain have knowledge
on how to map that domain into computer language data structures and
algorithms. This can be very specific knowledge, for instance writing a
device driver for a SCSI disk is very different from writing one for an IDE
drive.
It may not even be the best way of doing things, only the way that was done
once and therefore known to work (at least once).
Ppigers need to separate out specific domain programming knowledge
from the other kinds of programming knowledge if progress is to be
made in understanding what programmers do.
derek
--
Derek M Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252
520 667
Knowledge Software Ltd mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Applications Standards Conformance Testing http://www.knosof.co.uk
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