Lewis, C., Olson, G. M. Can Principles of Cognition Lower the Barriers to Programming? In Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop (Washington D.C. 1987) 248-263.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....Work There has been a wealth of relevant research in the fields of Psychology of Programming and Empirical Studies of Programmers. In these fields, programming is often defined as a process of transforming a mental plan that is in familiar terms into one that is compatible with the computer (e.g. Lewis Olson, 1987). Among others, Hoc Nguyen Xuan (1990) have shown that many bugs and difficulties arise because the distance between these is too large. This concept is called closeness of mapping by Green Petre (1996, p. 146) The closer the programming world is to the problem world, the easier the ....

Lewis, C., & Olson, G. M. (1987). Can Principles of Cognition Lower the Barriers to Programming? In G. M. Olson, S. Sheppard, & E. Soloway (Eds.), Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop, pp. 248-263. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

....created by experienced users contained errors in formulae, but Nardi and Miller (Nardi, 1993, Nardi and Miller, 1990, Nardi and Miller, 1991) suggest that there are no problems in formulae usage. Spreadsheet calculation has been said to be the success story of making programming easier (Lewis and Olson, 1987). The strength of spreadsheets have been contributed to familiar and concrete representation of data values and formulae, suppression of the inner world of traditional programming, automatic consistency maintenance, absence of control model, low viscosity, aggregate operations and immediate ....

Lewis, C. & Olson, G. M. (1987). Can Principles of Cognition Lower the Barriers to Programming. Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop, Washington, D. C., Ablex Publishing Corporation.

....programming language. The success of spreadsheet calculation systems has been attributed to their ease of use, users can see what is to be done and do it (Kay 1984) and to the metaphorical and visual nature of the user interface (Norman 1986) Despite this ease of use (for more balanced view, see (Lewis Olson 1987)) spreadsheet applications tend to have a lot of faults (Panko 1997) Even experienced users made errors in 44 of the cases reported by Brown and Gould (1987) Their study also showed that the errors were mostly made in entering calculations, not simply in typing constants: Seventy percent of ....

....between the computation and the data is established by referencing to locations in a sheet, Tukiainen ii PPIG 2000, Cozenza Italy www.ppig.org not the actual data structures in the model. These reasons for errors have been attributed to the low conceptual level of current spreadsheet systems (Lewis Olson 1987; Ronen et al. 1989) The low conceptual level of current spreadsheet systems manifests itself especially in the absence of the connection between the computation in the large and the data areas. The spreadsheet user enters formulae once and is supposed to remember to make changes to the ....

Lewis, C., & Olson, G. M. (1987). Can Principles of Cognition Lower the Barriers to Programming, Paper presented at the Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop, Washington, D. C.

....for reducing program redundancy, while maintaining program readability. Our mechanisms are designed to make writing programs easier by eliminating the need to define new names (or macros) for repeated program segments. Eliminating names is a substantial benefit programmers dislike creating names [1, 6]. Mechanisms for abbreviating programs have existed for some time. Pascal s with construct eliminates the need to repeat references to the same structure. Similarly, C s x abbreviates the common idiom, x=x 1. As a sample of the kinds of language mechanisms that we favor, we offer ....

....and nice are overloaded. Our proposals for shorthands similarly attempt to achieve a greater degree of compactness in programming languages. Nardi also cites studies showing that spreadsheet users benefit from not having to create variable names, a task many users find confusing and burdensome [6]. Our pronouns often eliminate new variables. Shorthands are not new and have been an important and heavily used feature for many years. From the earliest designs, efforts to reduce the amount of text in a program have been proposed 10 and adopted with varying amounts of success. Fortran s ....

Clayton Lewis and Gary M. Olson. Can principles of cognition lower the barriers to programming ? In Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop, pages 248--263, 1987.

....rearranging layout, editing pictures, etc. Hence, what we need is a mechanism to increase the coupling between the application and its user interface and we also need tools to design artifact interfaces. Ideally, a tool would include a construction paradigm with an intrinsic user interface [69]. 1.4.3. Participatory Theater: The Art of Knowing When to Invoke Programs A construction paradigm should include human computer interaction schemes giving people appropriate control over tools. Participatory theater combines the advantages of human computer interaction schemes based on ....

....User Interface The agents in the Agentsheets system are not mediators between the user and some abstract application. Instead, the agents are the application. Agents with their built in visualization methods can be viewed as a construction paradigm providing a visible manipulatable representation [69]. 2.4. Participatory Theater Participatory theater combines the advantages of human computer interaction schemes based on direct manipulation [57, 102] and delegation [85] into a continuous spectrum of control and effort. This section explains the interaction between users and agents, the ....

Lewis, C. and G. M. Olson, "Can Principles of Cognition Lower the Barriers to Programming?," Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop, Norwood, NJ, 1987, pp. 248-263.

.... with familiar entities and do not need to learn new computer specific concepts [11] It is more useful than generic software because the provided functionality directly targets tasks relevant to the domain and users do not have to build up desired behaviors from other lower level operations [17]. In our work, we have created numerous domain oriented design environments and domain oriented visual programming languages for domains such as kitchen design, network design, voice dialog design, and telephone service provisioning [8, 18, 25, 27, 28] ACCEPTED at DIS 95 Domain oriented systems ....

Lewis, C. and G. M. Olson, "Can Principles of Cognition Lower the Barriers to Programming?," Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop, 1987, pp. 248-263.

....the user would see in the actual interface. assignment statements. This makes programs more concrete. In addition, data icons are very similar in appearance to the desktop objects they represent. Languages that represent data as closely as possible to the real objects are easier to understand [7]. Similarly, operation representations are easy to understand because the changes in objects in a program mirror the changes in the actual desktop objects when the operations are executed. Also, by representing operations in this familiar way, users do not need to learn special code or languages ....

Clayton Lewis and Gary M. Olson. Can principles of cognition lower the barriers to programming? In Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop, pages 248--263. Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1987.

....Prograph, LabView, and a spreadsheet. C introduces many unusual primitives which have no relationship to the user s inherent goals, and requires programming games to put them together. At the other extreme, LabView has a single goal oriented primitive. Task specific entities: Lewis and Olson [4] show that for potential end user programmers, an abundance of low level primitives is one of the great cognitive barriers to programming. Nardi [5] persuasively argues the case for task specific languages, pointing out that users who reject conventional programming languages which do not draw ....

Lewis, C. and Olson, G. M. Can principles of cognition lower the barriers to programming? In G. M. Olson, S. Sheppard and E. Soloway (Eds.) Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1987.

....reinforced that view. The spatial reasoning mentioned above can be seen as using an intermediate mapping where possible. There is a powerful corollary: it is not easy to deal with entities in the program domain that do not have corresponding entities in the problem domain. Lewis and Olson [45] show that for potential end user programmers, an abundance of low level primitives is one of the great cognitive barriers to programming. Nardi [51] persuasively argues the case for task specific languages, since by definition they have a high proportion of entities that map very directly back to ....

....and planning goals , which exist solely in the solution domain. Computing gross profit for the year would be an inherent goal; declaring an identifier called Profit would be a planning goal. The crux of the problem in designing a programming language for end users, according to Lewis and Olson [45], is to avoid spawning shoals of planning goals. The problem with an abundance of low level primitives, in their view, is precisely that weaving them together correctly creates many planning goals. The problem of plan composition, mentioned above, can be seen as a problem of spawning planning ....

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Lewis, C. and Olson, G.M. (1987) Can principles of cognition lower the barriers to programming? In G. M. Olson, S. Sheppard and E. Soloway (Eds.) Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop., pp 248-263. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex.

.... has gained acceptance within industry for reducing GUI development times, although its potential applications are much broader than this (see [Mye90] for taxonomies of VP and [HI94] for a classification of VP languages) With standard textual programming languages being difficult to learn and use [LO87], two dimensional representations offer the potential to develop at higher levels of abstraction [Smi77] However, the use of true visual programming is still a rarity in industry. During the course of this work, Lee Braine was supported by an EPSRC research studentship and a CASE award from ....

C. Lewis, G. Olson. Can principles of cognition lower the barriers to programming? In Empirical Studies of Programmers, v2, Ablex (1987)

....PVL emphasizes manipulating sets of objects related in some way and minimizes the use of explicit control constructs such as loops and conditionals, since nonprogrammers often have difficulty with them. PVL also incorporates some principles of cognition that have made spreadsheets successful[2]: familiar, concrete representations; immediate feedback; suppressing the inner world of variables and computation; and automatic consistency maintenance. Finally, PVL serves as the main form of feedback for the PBD system. PVL[5] combines features of the comic strip metaphor (e.g. Chimera) and ....

C. Lewis and G. Olson. Can Principles of Cognition Lower the Barriers to Programming? In Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop.

....example is that a = a 3 makes no sense if read as in mathematics. These kinds of features should be avoided in the new language. A very low level language with many simple primitives requires the user to synthesize higher level operations. This is one of the great difficulties in programming [Lewis 1987]. When there are many different choices, more planning is required, and this increases the likelihood of backtracking and revision, which slows the programmer [Gray 1987] Therefore, the language should provide highlevel operations. The object oriented style seems to be harder to learn for ....

....to learn to program in a textual language. In fact, the most successful end user programming system is the spreadsheet, which is text based [Nardi 1993] New Metaphors One of the prominent themes in the prior research is the importance of a familiar concrete model for the computational system [Lewis 1987]. One way to obtain these critical attributes of concreteness and familiarity is to use a well known real world system as a metaphor for the computational machine. Many previous research systems used metaphors, such as the turtle in Logo. Natural Programming Project 88 Our proposed system ....

C. Lewis and G.M. Olson. "Can Principles of Cognition Lower the Barriers to Programming?" Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop. G. M. Olson, S. Sheppard and E. Soloway. 1987: Norwood, NJ, Ablex. pp. 248-263.

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Lewis, C., Olson, G. M. Can Principles of Cognition Lower the Barriers to Programming? In Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop (Washington D.C. 1987) 248-263.

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Lewis, C. and Olson, G. "Can Principles of Cognition Lower the Barrier to Prograxnming?" In Empirical Studies of Programmers, Second Workshop, Olson, G.; Sheppaxd, S.; and Soloway, E. eds. Ablex, NJ 1987.

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Lewis, C. and Olson, G. "Can Principles of Cognition Lower the Barrier to Programming?" In Empirical Studies of Programmers, Second Workshop, Olson, G.; Sheppard, S.; and Soloway, E. eds. Ablex, NJ 1987.

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Clayton Lewis and Gary M. Olson, #1987#. Can Principles of Cognition Lower the Barriers to Programming? In Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop, pages 248#263.

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Clayton Lewis and Gary M. Olson, (1987). Can Principles of Cognition Lower the Barriers to Programming? In Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop, pages 248--263.

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Clayton Lewis and Gary M. Olson (1987). Can Principles of Cognition Lower the Barriers to Programming? In Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop, pages 248--263.

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