Hi y'all,
Does anyone know of literature about slips (unconscious mistakes) in
programming practice?
I'm aware of Adelson's work in this area (BibTeX follows below). As I
recall, Adelson (1981) found that expert programmers chunk up
(abstract) code and don't follow all the details, whereas novices
chunk down (concretize) and don't see abstract structures so clearly.
This probably rings bells with everyone's teaching experiences.
Adelson (1984) then found that novices out-perform experts in
answering concrete questions about program understanding but perform
similarly to experts when answering abstract questions. This perhaps
suggests (or confirms) why experts make mistakes in the detail of
programming -- their mental model has already abstracted away a whole
bunch of tricky stuff.
Can anyone do better? It seems like such an obvious (and interesting)
area of study that I'm sure I'm missing some obvious literature
somewhere ...
Very many thanks,
Sarah
@Article{Adelson81,
author = {Adelson, B.},
title = {Problem solving and the development of abstract categories
in programming languages},
journal = {Memory and Cognition},
year = {1981},
volume = {9},
pages = {422-433},
}
@Article{Adelson84,
author = {Adelson, B.},
title = {When Novices Surpass Experts: How the difficulty of a task
may increase with expertise},
journal = {Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and
Cognition},
year = {1984},
volume = {10},
number = {3},
pages = {483-495},
month = jul,
note = {Reprinted in Human Factors in Software Development (2nd ed.);
Bill Curtis (ed.). 1985. IEEE Computer Society Press:
Washington, DC. 55-67.},
}
--
http://www.mis.coventry.ac.uk/research/imd/
http://varspool.blogspot.com
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