On 24 Nov 2009, at 22:31, Richard O'Keefe wrote: > Please, let's not argue about words. Let's argue about semantics. > The fact of the matter is that people do have strong feelings about > what is intuitive and what is not, and that these feelings are not > idiosyncratic but widespread. That doesn't mean they are universal. > It doesn't mean that they are not culture-bound. But if we can > have studies of why people choose one political party of another, > we can have studies of why people report that one programming > approach is more "intuitive" than another
The fact that people have strong feelings about something doesn't make it meaningful. Sure we can have studies about political parties because in general quite a few people have fairly concrete reasons for picking one over another (though I think that a surprisingly large number of people would fall back on things that are unquantifiable like "niceness"). If people report than programming language is more "intuitive" than another then ask those people why and see what they say : I bet most of them can't tell you why and just end up either going round in circles or saying "it just is". You also have to do it with some new programming language they have never met before or else your result is entirely comprised by previous experience of the language. I think something far more interesting but sort of related is why people get emotional attachments (or otherwise) to languages. I have a passionate dislike of Java and do not get on at all with Python or Perl, but I have always like tcl a lot. I can give you reasons but they are probably not well argued or indeed sensible and I know this, but that doesn't change my feelings about them and it is unlikely that anything will particularly wrt to Java. (c.f. Norman's Emotional Design) BTW I can't think of any programming languages that are intuitive, not even slightly. L.
