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0 pointsfuzztester5mo ago0 comments

Perl is one obvious one, as anyone will realize, if one has read some of Larry Wall's articles about his (and later the team's) motivations for the (syntax and semantics) design decisions they made about the language. For example, in his annual State of The Onion talks, he often discusses these points.

They may not have used standards such as the gp comment mentions, but they definitely considered human factors a lot.

E.g. TIMTOWTDI - There Is More Than One Way To Do It.

But that's not the only area in which they applied it.

0 comments

Rochus5mo ago

Perl presents a fascinating counterexample: Larry Wall, trained as a linguist, explicitly cared about human factors, but his linguistic philosophy produced a language that empirical tests show performs poorly on readability and learnability measures (see e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2534973 or https://doi.org/10.1145/2089155.2089159).

bluGill5mo ago

I haven't used Perl much, but my impression it is much easier to learn if you already know awk and sed - his original target was people who knew awk and sed well but were running into limitations using the two as separate tools. However the language quickly spread to people who don't know either of the previous tools and then it is difficult to learn.

fuzztesterOP5mo ago

>I haven't used Perl much, but my impression it is much easier to learn if you already know awk and sed - his original target was people who knew awk and sed well but were running into limitations using the two as separate tools.

Yes. In fact, in the early days, there were tools with names like sed2perl and awk2perl, or similar, IIRC. And those could convert code between their respective source and target languages.

And even easier if you know C and Unix.

pjmlp5mo ago

Just like human dialects, across the same main language, :)

agumonkey5mo ago

I'm gonna read your links but I assume that 90% of the programming population doesn't grasp linguistic approaches to representing knowledge and logic (not saying this as a superiority thing, more as a cultural gap too wide)

btilly5mo ago

I'm sorry, but both of those studies are a joke. They are taking novices who can't program, and are asking them to perform basic programming tasks in languages that they haven't learned. They are essentially testing how steep the initial learning curve is when you first see a language.

A far more important measure is something like function points per month of developer time. See page 49 of https://www.ifpug.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IYSM.-Thirt... for some data on that. ADA 95 did pretty well, around 11. Perl beat it with 15.

Of course that measure isn't perfect. Excel trounced both with over 30. But Excel is only appropriate for some kinds of projects.

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