Natural Programming Summary

ACM Queue has a good short summary of the Natural Programming project here at CMU.

http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=225


It is somewhat surprising that in spite of over 30 years of research in the areas of empirical studies of programmers (ESP) and human-computer interaction (HCI), the designs of new programming languages and debugging tools have generally not taken advantage of what has been discovered. For example, the C#, JavaScript, and Java languages use the same mechanisms for looping, conditionals, and assignments shown to cause many errors for both beginning and expert programmers in the C language. Systems such as MacroMedia's Director and Flash, Microsoft's Visual Basic, and general-purpose programming environments like MetroWerks' CodeWarrior and Microsoft's Visual C++, all provide the same debugging techniques available for 60 years: breakpoints, print statements, and showing the values of variables.

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