> At least I’ve never seen properly conducted studies involving psychologists or neuroscientists upon introducing yet another new fancy feature into a programming language.
I studied Mechanical Engineering, but did my Master Thesis on "Evaluation of MicroPython as Application Layer Programming Language on CubeSats"* - way out of my depth.
I tried to find some prior work on how to chose programming languages for specific domains, and how to judge if a language is the right tool for a task - and there wasn't much.
I even tried to measure how "easy" a programming language is, in a hilariously misinformed user study. There were 8 people, I was measuring the time it took them to implement small snippets in Python vs. C. I had this one dataset with weird outliers, where a person who performed really well, just took forever for some of the tasks ... later one of the participants told me he texted during the study.
And although I felt really bad about my really bad study, I also felt like the avantgarde of the field^^
Anyway, if we can find someone to fund it, I'd like to see brain activity scans of programmers using different languages. We already know smartphone usage rewires our brains. I wanna see the brain of JavaScript developer compared to a Lisper, Rustacean, ... .
* conference paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319525786_Evaluatio...
I studied Mechanical Engineering, but did my Master Thesis on "Evaluation of MicroPython as Application Layer Programming Language on CubeSats"* - way out of my depth.
I tried to find some prior work on how to chose programming languages for specific domains, and how to judge if a language is the right tool for a task - and there wasn't much.
I even tried to measure how "easy" a programming language is, in a hilariously misinformed user study. There were 8 people, I was measuring the time it took them to implement small snippets in Python vs. C. I had this one dataset with weird outliers, where a person who performed really well, just took forever for some of the tasks ... later one of the participants told me he texted during the study.
And although I felt really bad about my really bad study, I also felt like the avantgarde of the field^^
Anyway, if we can find someone to fund it, I'd like to see brain activity scans of programmers using different languages. We already know smartphone usage rewires our brains. I wanna see the brain of JavaScript developer compared to a Lisper, Rustacean, ... .
* conference paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319525786_Evaluatio...