Discovering the way programmers think about new programming environments

  • Authors:
  • Joseph Dumas;Paige Parsons

  • Affiliations:
  • American Institutes for Research, 70 Westview St. Lexington, MA;Apple Computer, 1 Main Street, 7th Floor, Cambridge, MA

  • Venue:
  • Communications of the ACM
  • Year:
  • 1995

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Abstract

An interesting usability study of a prototype development environment for the Dylan programming language is presented here. This study's purpose is to determine just how close the prototype is to developers. New approaches to source code organization and to the relationship between the environment and the application being developed are introduced. An asessment of how effectively the prototype conveys these innovations to Dylan developers is also given, followed by some proposed improvements.