Hi Ben, Interesting find.
2018-06-08 14:29 GMT+02:00 Ben Coman <b...@openinworld.com>: > I bumped into a paper "Empirical Analysis of Programming Language Adoption" > that I thought might be of interest to others since we'd like to increase > Pharo's mindshare. (http://sns.cs.princeton.edu/docs/asr-oopsla13.pdf) > > TLDR; my top three take outs were... > > Figure 5 indicates that simple syntax and languages features don't attract > new users, and of the things we can control the most important are... > performance, portability and development speed. This is interesting, and they also insist in the paper that developpers do not care that much about the semantics of what they use... > Figure 12 suggests a strategy to promote useful libraries rather than > language features. I guess that might best take take the form blogs showing > the use of libraries. And have librairies that are really usefull... A possible strategy then would be a stable, clean core, and librairies that really make a difference. > Table 7 makes and interesting assertion that static types are more important > for readability than preventing bugs. This one is in line with Dan Luu meta-study that static typing catches at best a small proportion of bugs. Note that this is used in Smalltalk, when you write anInteger, aString : you're using a form of typing for documentation. By the way, I wrote for fun a small metalink-based run-time type-checker using method argument names. To be used when running unit tests :) Regards, Thierry > cheers -ben > > > P.S. Then I bumped into "Toward Semantic Foundations for Program Editors" > (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.08694.pdf) > which was over my head but I guess it might be interesting to people working > in UI area.
