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A comparative usability study on a language is very simple to perform: you basically print out some code samples, let people with no experience in the language

A comparative usability study on a language is very simple to perform: you basically print out some code samples, let people with no experience in the language (but general programming experience) read them for a set time period, and then evaluate their comprehension. That is just one axis of usability, optimizing for comprehension by someone unfamiliar with the language. Usability is also optimizing for the experienced programmer. Some designs do a good job for both, some work well for one at the expense of the other. Hef Raskin had some interesting things to say about this: http://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html http://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html

joe_the_user 16y ago
I have to say I'm not impressed by the link. Intuitiveness is indeed highly correlated to previous human experience. But aside from pre-existing interfaces, an interface designer has available the whole of an average person's real world experience - the mouse is intuitive because it mimics a person's experience of moving a physical object - it doesn't mimic exactly but closely enough that a person can use their existing experience to extrapolate. And an interface designer who wanted to improve a standard interface may be able to find a different facet of human experience analogous to the task at hand and thus (contrary to the link) it is possible to create interfaces which are new and intuitive (but I'll admit it's damn hard and you should have a reason). Most computer languages leverage human experience with natural language - not exactly, but partly. That's why Ruby's "return 5 if done" syntax seems really nice. Thus I'd argue you can make a reasonable study of what constitutes an intuitive interface. So I claim the intuitiveness of Lisp's parentheses is a valid question for debate.
- raganwald 16y ago
  Of course familiarity by way of similarity to previous experience is a valid question for debate. My claim is that it is just one of several considerations for judging the merit of an overall design, and not necessarily the most important one.
euccastro 16y ago
Also, people with 'no experience in the language', but with 'general programming experience' will be primed with the conventions of mainstream languages and biased against s-expressions. (Btw, it's Jef Raskin.)
- derefr 16y ago
  By "general programming experience," I didn't mean "mainstream programming experience," but rather "having been given a survey of techniques for programming in iterative, functional, OOP, declarative/constraint-based, concatenative, etc. languages, without having learned a single one." In other words, someone who was taught to program for the purposes of the test.
  - euccastro 16y ago
    How do you learn to program without learning any programming languages?

joe_the_user 16y ago

I have to say I'm not impressed by the link. Intuitiveness is indeed highly correlated to previous human experience. But aside from pre-existing interfaces, an interface designer has available the whole of an average person's real world experience - the mouse is intuitive because it mimics a person's experience of moving a physical object - it doesn't mimic exactly but closely enough that a person can use their existing experience to extrapolate. And an interface designer who wanted to improve a standard interface may be able to find a different facet of human experience analogous to the task at hand and thus (contrary to the link) it is possible to create interfaces which are new and intuitive (but I'll admit it's damn hard and you should have a reason). Most computer languages leverage human experience with natural language - not exactly, but partly. That's why Ruby's "return 5 if done" syntax seems really nice. Thus I'd argue you can make a reasonable study of what constitutes an intuitive interface. So I claim the intuitiveness of Lisp's parentheses is a valid question for debate.

raganwald 16y ago
Of course familiarity by way of similarity to previous experience is a valid question for debate. My claim is that it is just one of several considerations for judging the merit of an overall design, and not necessarily the most important one.

euccastro 16y ago

Also, people with 'no experience in the language', but with 'general programming experience' will be primed with the conventions of mainstream languages and biased against s-expressions. (Btw, it's Jef Raskin.)

derefr 16y ago
By "general programming experience," I didn't mean "mainstream programming experience," but rather "having been given a survey of techniques for programming in iterative, functional, OOP, declarative/constraint-based, concatenative, etc. languages, without having learned a single one." In other words, someone who was taught to program for the purposes of the test.
- euccastro 16y ago
  How do you learn to program without learning any programming languages?