Alan,
You stated:
>I believe that the academic establishment rapidly expands to
>fill gaps in the research ecosystem. If there was any real need
>for the psychology of automobile body welding, someone would be
>doing it.
Let me assure that you are dead, 100% wrong. There are a great many areas that
lack behavioral research activity in which it is badly needed. The academic
community is that, a community, in which groups of researchers share results.
If you went off and did research on the psychology of programming for automobile
welding, where would you publish it? More important, who else could understand your
work and cite it? (myself and Willamien Visser don't make much of a community)
The only time academic researchers head off into a totally new area is when the
government or a large industry group offers funding to many researchers at once.
That only happens when some one lobbys the group on the potential value of this
kind of work. (Anybody want to go and talk to the Automobile Body Consortium?)
More important, I don't think one can draw a clear line between programming knowledge,
software engineering knowledge and "application" knowledge. All of these things are
involved
in writing a successful program. If you don't know the algorithm for mud thickness
correction
in petroleum well logging, there's no hope that you will ever be able to form a
correct series
of statements in Eiffel or C++ to carry out the calculation. Certainly, you need to
have
some kind of model or theory of how the statements are put together but you also need
to have
a model or theory about how these "programming plans" are selected and applied from
the application requirements. To fully understand program writing behavior, you need
to model
all of the kinds of knowledge and problem solving that are involved.
I recognize that probably the hardest thing to get a grip on is the "application
knowledge."
For the reasons given above, going off into an application area can be pretty lonely
work.
Serious applications often involve serious learning, and there are few rewards for
spending, say, three years learning cardiac surgery, so that you can then write a
paper on programming of surgical monitoring software. Nevertheless, I argue that
understanding the application is essential to understanding the program.
Ruven Brooks
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