Talk:BASIC in Print and in Memory

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(→Michael's Comments on Programming Plans: moved here)

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Michael, this is good to know and we'll want to mention the existence of more sophisticated models if that paragraph on Ruven stays in. (It doesn't really speak to the core of this section, but it seemed like an interesting opportunity to point out how 10 PRINT is an outlier and how theories about industrial programming don't apply to it.) But the main discussion here is about the memorization of programs. Do any of these papers deal with that? I didn't see from the annotations in the bibliography that they do. '''-Nick'''

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Look for abstracts that talk about program comprehension. Many program comprehension tasks involve memorizing the program. For example, in "Mental representations of programs by novices and experts" by Fix, Wiedenbeck and Scholtz (http://portal.acm.org.oca.ucsc.edu/citation.cfm?id=169059.169088&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=96919946&CFTOKEN=26471234), subjects are given a 135 line pascal program to study (no comments or documentation) - the program is taken away, and they are asked a series of questions about the program to test how deeply they understood the program (which of course involves having memorized at least some aspects of the program). Memorization and programming plans are intimately related. In this psychological theory of programming, what makes an expert programmer an expert is the accumulation of programming plans. Experts will be able to memorize programs more effectively than novices because, instead of memorizing meaningless word and character-level sequences, they are recognizing and memorizing more abstract programming plans, which they re-concretize if asked to reproduce the program. Of course, multiple concrete representations exist for the same instantiated abstract plan(s), which, they theory predicts, could cause a programmer to reproduce a program that accomplishes the same abstract plans, but may use different low-level details than the original program, which is exactly what happened to you in your re-creation of 10 Print.

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Here is a draft of a 1995 article on program comprehension from the Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology that talks about the relationship between memorization and comprehension, and also talks about Schneiderman's work, which you do cite: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.51.1404&rep=rep1&type=pdf.

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 Michael, this is good to know and we'll want to mention the existence of more sophisticated models if that paragraph on Ruven stays in. (It doesn't really speak to the core of this section, but it seemed like an interesting opportunity to point out how 10 PRINT is an outlier and how theories about industrial programming don't apply to it.) But the main discussion here is about the memorization of programs. Do any of these papers deal with that? I didn't see from the annotations in the bibliography that they do. '''-Nick'''
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+Look for abstracts that talk about program comprehension. Many program comprehension tasks involve memorizing the program. For example, in "Mental representations of programs by novices and experts" by Fix, Wiedenbeck and Scholtz (http://portal.acm.org.oca.ucsc.edu/citation.cfm?id=169059.169088&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=96919946&CFTOKEN=26471234), subjects are given a 135 line pascal program to study (no comments or documentation) - the program is taken away, and they are asked a series of questions about the program to test how deeply they understood the program (which of course involves having memorized at least some aspects of the program). Memorization and programming plans are intimately related. In this psychological theory of programming, what makes an expert programmer an expert is the accumulation of programming plans. Experts will be able to memorize programs more effectively than novices because, instead of memorizing meaningless word and character-level sequences, they are recognizing and memorizing more abstract programming plans, which they re-concretize if asked to reproduce the program. Of course, multiple concrete representations exist for the same instantiated abstract plan(s), which, they theory predicts, could cause a programmer to reproduce a program that accomplishes the same abstract plans, but may use different low-level details than the original program, which is exactly what happened to you in your re-creation of 10 Print.
+Here is a draft of a 1995 article on program comprehension from the Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology that talks about the relationship between memorization and comprehension, and also talks about Schneiderman's work, which you do cite: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.51.1404&rep=rep1&type=pdf.