Empirical studies on programming language stimuli |
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Authors: | Andreas Stefik Ed Gellenbeck |
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Affiliation: | (1) Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Edwardsville, IL, USA;(2) Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA, USA |
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Abstract: | Comprehending and debugging computer programs are inherently difficult tasks. The current approach to building program execution
and debugging environments is to use exclusively visual stimuli on programming languages whose syntax and semantics has often
been designed without empirical guidance. We present an alternative: Sodbeans, an open-source integrated development environment
designed to output carefully chosen spoken auditory cues to supplement empirically evaluated visual stimuli. Originally designed
for the blind, earlier work suggested that Sodbeans may benefit sighted programmers as well. We evaluate Sodbeans in two experiments.
First, we report on a formal debugging experiment comparing (1) a visual debugger, (2) an auditory debugger, and (3) a multimedia
debugger, which includes both visual and auditory stimuli. The results from this study indicate that while auditory debuggers
on their own are significantly less effective for sighted users when compared with visual and multimedia debuggers, multimedia
debuggers might benefit sighted programmers under certain circumstances. Specifically, we found that while multimedia debuggers
do not provide instant usability, once programmers have some practice, their performance in answering comprehension questions
improves. Second, we created and evaluated a pilot survey analyzing individual elements in a custom programming language (called
HOP) to garner empirical metrics on their comprehensibility. Results showed that some of the most widely used syntax and semantics
choices in commercial programming languages are extraordinarily unintuitive for novices. For example, at an aggregate level,
the word
for
, as in a
for
loop, was rated reliably worse than
repeat
by more than 673% by novices. After completing our studies, we implemented the HOP programming language and integrated it
into Sodbeans. |
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Keywords: | |
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