3 ms·
Are there plans to actually measure "simple, obvious, and easy to reason about" with people? As I mentioned in the discussion two days ago, PL researchers thro
by azhenley 8y ago
Are there plans to actually measure "simple, obvious, and easy to reason about" with people?
As I mentioned in the discussion two days ago, PL researchers throw around these terms but never actually measure them. You can learn a lot from a small user study.
- msvan 8y agoI am very tired of the phrase "easy/hard to reason about." It sounds so hand-wavy every time.
- azhenley 8y agoI would be fine with "easier to reason about" if they did a comparison study to some other language. For example, have participants do a few comprehension tasks with Bosque code snippets and also with C++ code snippets. Measure task completion time, task success, and self-reported cognitive load [1]. Then do a semi-structured interview to get some insights into the participants' opinions. [1] Cognitive Load Measurement as a Means to Advance Cognitive Load Theory https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15326985EP3801_8 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/S15326985EP3801_...
- bb88 8y agoA concrete example of "hard to reason about" is: High level languages exist to remove the complexity of opcodes of the bare metal running underneath. And that's because assembly code (unless you're well versed in it) is hard to reason about.