[manifesto] Fwd: Programming and psychology reading group

[Trijeet Mukhopadhyay]

Might be interesting to some?

—
Trijeet Mukhopadhyay
Stanford University
B.S. Computer Science
M.S. Candidate Computer Science – Human Computer Interaction
http://trijeetm.com/

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Will Crichton <wcrichto at cs.stanford.edu>
Date: Tue, Apr 16th, 2019 at 4:13 PM
Subject: Programming and psychology reading group
To: <hci-students at lists.stanford.edu>

> 
> Hi everyone, I'm starting a reading group for papers relating to
> programming and psychology. We're interested in understanding the
> cognitive processes that underlie programming, and using insights about
> cognition to inform the design of programmable systems.
> 
> If you're interested, we're going to meet *Monday 3pm-4pm in Gates 315*
> for now (I know this conflicts with James' group meeting, so this will
> probably change soon). Sign up for our mailing list to see scheduling and
> announcements:
> 
> 
> programming-psychology at lists.stanford.edu
> 
> 
> 
> Below is the message I sent out with details for next week. Please send me
> a note if you'd like to join!
> 
> 
> ====================================
> 
> 
> Hi everyone, here's the papers we're reading for next week along with a
> characteristic excerpt. These are lengthy papers, about 70 pages between
> the three of them, so I would get started soon!
> 
> 
> 
>> 
> 
> Simon, Herbert A., and Allen Newell. “Human Problem Solving: The State of
> the Theory in 1970.” American Psychologist 26, no. 2 (1971): 145–59. 
> https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1971-24266-001
> 
> 
> 
>> Problem solving was regarded by many, at that time, as a mystical, almost
>> magical, human activity —as though the preservation of human dignity
>> depended on man's remaining inscrutable to himself, on the magic-making
>> processes remaining unexplained. ... American behaviorism has been
>> properly skeptical of "mentalism"—of attempts to explain thinking by vague
>> references to vague entities and processes hidden beyond reach of
>> observation within the skull. ... The programmability of the theories is
>> the guarantor of their operationality, an iron-clad insurance against
>> admitting magical entities into the head. The basic characteristics of the
>> human information-processing system that shape its problem-solving efforts
>> are easily stated: serial processing, small short-term memory, infinite
>> long-term memory with fast retrieval but slow storage.
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> Sheil, B. A. “The Psychological Study of Programming.” ACM Computing
> Surveys, 1981.
> https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=356840
> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
>> The unimpressive results of behavioral research on programming could
>> simply be the results of sloppy methodology, of a poor choice of
>> hypotheses from computer science, and of the considerable practical
>> difficulty of investigating complex behavior. ... They give no account of
>> the most salient single fact about programming, which is that the
>> difficulty of programming is a very nonlinear function of the size of the
>> problem.  ... More fundamentally, programming is clearly a learned skill,
>> and, therefore, what is easy or difficult is much more a function of what
>> skills an individual has learned than of any inherent quality of the task.
>> High individual variances, strong practice effects, and (consequently)
>> weak findings are exactly what one would expect from studying the average
>> performance of highly learned skills across diverse collections of
>> individuals.  
>> 
> 
> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
>> 
> 
> Davies, Simon P. “Models and Theories of Programming Strategy.”
> International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 1993.
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0020737383710618
> ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0020737383710618 )
> 
> ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0020737383710618 )
> 
>> While many studies have demonstrated the importance of strategic
>> knowledge, they have not presented a unified characterization of the
>> nature of programming strategy. ... One can derive different, and often
>> conflicting, predictions from these models about the strategy that will be
>> adopted by programmers. ... The picture that emerges contrasts knowledge
>> about what steps to take to achieve a goal with understanding of the
>> appropriate circumstances in which to apply those steps. All too often
>> generic theories of expertise have made simplifying assumptions about the
>> nature of problem-solving knowledge and have tended to emphasize specific
>> forms of knowledge over others.
>> 
> 
> 
> ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0020737383710618 )
> These papers are mostly surveys/reviews of prior work. I selected them
> because they each contain different ideas and criticisms and they span the
> three decades where most of the relevant research was done in this area.
> I've read through the first two and they're great--the third I haven't
> read yet so I'm not sure, but it's the only sizable review of 1980s work I
> could find that wasn't a book. Some questions to think about as you read
> through these papers.
> 
> 
> * What are the different aspects of programming that each paper is
> attempting to understand? 
> 
> * For experiments/studies, what is the methodology? How generalizable are
> the outcomes? How controlled are the conditions?
> 
> 
> * For models/theories, what is the assumed cognitive structure? How close
> does the model match observed data?
> 
> 
> 
> See you all next week, 3pm-4pm in Gates 315.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>
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