Richard,
Does anyone know whether there's any empirical evidence either way
for the hypothesis
programmers find a programming language or paradigm
"intuitive" to the degree that it resembles what they
learned first
?
First of all your question suggests that there is a one side fits
If the plural of "anecdote" is "empirical evidence", then I'd suggest
it's not as simple as that. In Cambridge, the first language taught
was ML (a functional language). Over around five years, I tutored
around sixty students in Java, which was the second language taught
and also a compul
Title: Keith Brian Gallagher, PhD
i'll bite
i'm not sure intuition exists. i went to dictionary.com and got this
about intuition: "the ability of the native speaker to make linguistic
judgments, as of
the grammaticality, ambiguity, equivalence, or nonequivalence of
sentences, deriving from the
There was interesting work done in the 70s exploring how non-
programmers described in English tasks
that, in principle, might be turned into programs (see e.g. Lance A.
Miller, Thomas Green, John C. Thomas).
The experiments showed that neither loops nor conditionals as often
employed in imperativ
When Lisp was introduced to us in 2nd year undergrad CS, the
professor promised it would be a relief to work with such an intuitive
language, which was designed to be written like we think. After a month or
so, most of us were wondering which planet does that "we" refer to.
Personally, I loved Lisp
(forwarding my earlier direct reply to Richard)
[This is] A regularly recurring question, over the years of PPIG!
This has been the starting point for a number of PhDs, but a religious
war seldom makes a good PhD. I'm not aware that the results have ever
found anything very conclusive. Some o
"Programmers find a programming language or paradigm 'intuitive' to
the degree that it resembles what they learned first". As is generally
the case with assertions, it isn't a matter of right/wrong, but a
matter of trade-offs.
I can't find a digital copy at the moment, but the following paper
desc
> "Programmers find a programming language or paradigm
> 'intuitive' to the degree that it resembles what they learned
> first".
I believe educational literature and research would argue that 'Programmers
find a programming language or paradigm easier to learn to the degree that
they are able to
Here is a research reference on prior knowledge aiding comprehension.
Ozuru, Y., Dempsey, K., & McNamara, D. S. (2009). Prior knowledge, reading
skill, and text cohesion in the comprehension of science texts. Learning and
Instruction, 19(3), 228-242.
Errol Thompson
Kiwi-ET Computing Consultancy a
Alan Blackwell wrote:
1) What is the measure of 'intuitive' that you propose to use?
Asking for the measure is sage advice, I'd say, for a PhD candidate, but
the question that first flashes in my mind is whether intuition -- and
intuition in programming -- is a phenomena that can be identifie
On Nov 24, 2009, at 1:20 AM, Derek M Jones wrote:
Richard,
Does anyone know whether there's any empirical evidence either way
for the hypothesis
programmers find a programming language or paradigm
"intuitive" to the degree that it resembles what they
learned first
?
First of all yo
On Nov 24, 2009, at 2:38 AM, Ben Du Boulay wrote:
There was interesting work done in the 70s exploring how non-
programmers described in English tasks
that, in principle, might be turned into programs (see e.g. Lance A.
Miller, Thomas Green, John C. Thomas).
The experiments showed that neithe
On Nov 24, 2009, at 3:18 AM, keith gallagher wrote:
like i said, i'm not sure intuition exists
What's quite certain is that *claims* of intuitiveness exist.
I think it's possible to operationalise the concept.
Given languages of similar syntactic complexity,
which of several paradigms is
Richard,
www.knosof.co.uk/cbook/accu06.html
...
To my thinking the graphs in figure 1 show no effect of experience.
That means that interesting as the experiment was, it may not bear
on the question of whether there is empirical evidence that the
'imperative' paradigm is most intuitive.
It
On Nov 24, 2009, at 9:46 AM, Andrew Walenstein wrote:
On 23 Nov 2009, at 04:23, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
functional or logic programming. Since they didn't seem to be
familiar with the fairly wide gap between a typical first-year
model of how an imperative language and what _really_ happens
(e.
All successful languages are a mixture of all styles, with parts that are
functional, imperative, object-oriented, etc. A programmer needs to learn
them all.
Brad Myers
-Original Message-
From: Richard O'Keefe [mailto:o...@cs.otago.ac.nz]
Sent: Monday, November 23, 2009 6:04 PM
To: keith
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