3 ms·
Actually, I spend a week doing hands-on interviews with actual people whom had no prior programming experience. At first, I thought details like curly brackets,
by rasmusfabbe 15y ago
Actually, I spend a week doing hands-on interviews with actual people whom had no prior programming experience. At first, I thought details like curly brackets, parenthesis and so on would put them off, but not a single person had a problem with that, to my surprise.
You might say that significant whitespace (i.e. the indentation level signifies structure) is a more natural way, but when you think about it there's no where else in these peoples lives where indentation of text determines it's function or effect. When you e.g. in Word indent text it's a purely visual effect (which might imply or give greater meaning to structure, but not define it). Thus, significant whitespace is not as natural as parenthesis and -- it turns out -- curly braces.
Now, I only did qualitative research and have yet to see a large uptake in usage. I personally use Move for 95% of everything I write nowadays and I have colleagues and friends who are also writing things in Move, so I guess time will tell if this is actually a more "natural" programming language than, say, JavaScript.
I recently wrote this update on the Move language. A sort of retrospect: http://rsms.me/2011/07/30/an-update-on-move.html http://rsms.me/2011/07/30/an-update-on-move.html