I've mentioned a few times my desire that programming languages have a firmer foundation in science, notably psychology. Of course, there is a large body of work in this area that most programming language researchers (in particular, me) know nothing about. Here is a pointer to a course on the subject, taught at Cambridge by
Alan Blackwell (above). Blackwell worked with Thomas Green. Green is the author of one of the few papers on the subject I know that has a clear, usable result: people find it easier to work with a flat sequence of conditions than with a nest of 'if' statements. Thanks to Lambda the Ultimate for a pointer to Blackwell's course.
2 comments:
What's the paper mentioned ?
My memory of Green's article was wrong. He claims that a nested structure is better than a flat one!
Ifs and thens: Is nesting just for the birds? T. R. G. Green. Software: Practice and Experience. Volume 10, Issue 5, pages 373–381, May 1980.
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