>
> I have a coleague working in the area of CAD, who is interested in
> what kind of difference it would make if a CAD run took 2 hours, or 15
> minutes, instead of the current 8-12 hours. He thought (and I agree)
> that there ought to be a parallel to how long it takes to compile a
> program. They are in the equivalent of the era where we submitted a
> card deck and waited a day for turn around.
>
> Does anyone know of studies about what changes when compiles
> drastically change the amount of time they take? I vaguely remember
> some data that suggested that people worked very hard to get the
> errors out by hand (even hand simulating the program before they
> submitted it) when turn around was hours, but when the turn around
> improved, they got more sloppy, but I don't know of any other work in
> this area. Any pointers?
>
> Robin Jeffries
There's a paper by O'Hara and Payne in IJHCS v50 on the effect
of increasing the costs of operations in an interface. The gist
is that if you make it more expensive to experiment by playing
with the environment then people plan more. It seems to comment
(if you squint hard enough at the paper) on the old tradeoff
between munge-and-test and tedious thinking. As you note, the
turnaround time for jobs in the old batch processing systems made
programmers sit and think whereas online debugging helps shelve that
effortful instinct. From the above paper's point of view, you can
predict what people will do based on a tradeoff analysis between
the two modes of problem solving.
Hope this helps.
Andrew
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