Re: "human factors" and programming languages

Anthony Shipman <als@tusc.com.au> wrote:
>Has there been much research on programming languages from a "human factors"
>viewpoint, much like there is with computer-human interfaces?


If I understand your question correctly, yes there is a reasonably
rich tradition of application of human factors, psychology and
cognitive science to the problem of programming. The HCI Bibliography
Project (http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~perlman/hcibib/) lists many of
the papers in the area, including the recently discussed (in this
newsgroup) topic of debugging.


Look for the conferences "Empirical Studies of Programmers", and the
BCS "People and Computers", and the journals "Behaviour and
Information Technology" and "Inter. Jour. of Man-Machine Studies".
These four series appear to contain a good fraction of the literature.
You might also check out the IEEE Workshop on Program Comprehension
held in conjunction with the ICSE for the last number of years.


From what I can tell, human factors of programming truly blossomed just
after the introduction of "structured programing".


--
Andrew Walenstein, walen@cs.sfu.ca


--

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