Interesting study. Here's a summary of their results: 1: "between". Experienced programmers were more likely to incorrectly assume that the results of earlier

Interesting study. Here's a summary of their results: 1: "between". Experienced programmers were more likely to incorrectly assume that the results of earlier calculations would be used in a later calculation. 2: "counting". All participants, regardless of experience, were more likely to assume that a statement separated by vertical whitespace was outside of a loop, when it was actually still inside the loop. (Note that the programming language is Python, which doesn't have a loop termination token.) 3: "funcall". Whitespace between operators (e.g., 3+4+5 vs. 3 + 4 + 5) had no effect. 4: "initvar". No interesting result. (This one seems to have been mis-designed.) 5: "order". Respondents were slower when functions were defined in a different order than they were used. Experienced programmers didn't slow down as much. 6: "overload". Experienced programmers were more likely to be slower when faced with a "+" operator used for both string concatenation ("5" + "6") and addition (5 + 6), rather than used for just concatenation. 7: "partition". There was a result, but I don't think we can draw meaningful conclusions from it. 8: "rectangle". Calculating the area of a rectangle using a function that took tuples (e.g., "area(xy_1, xy_2)") took longer for programmers to understand than a function that took scalars (e.g., "area(x1, y1, x2, y2)"). Calculating the area using a class (e.g., "rect = Rectangle(0, 0, 10, 10); print rect.area()" took the same amount of time as using scalars, despite being a longer program. 9: "scope". No conclusive result. 10: "whitespace". Using horizontal whitespace to line up similar statements had no effect on response time. (There was another result relating to order of operations that deserves further study, but it wasn't thoroughly tested here, so I don't think it's conclusive.) Note that all programs were exceedingly simple (the longest was 24 lines), so be cautious applying these conclusions to real-world work.