Slashdot Mirror
How Experienced And Novice Programmers See Code
Esther Schindler writes "We always talk about how programmers improve their skill by reading others' code. But the newbies aren't going to be as good at even doing that, when they start. There's some cool research underway, using eye tracking to compare how an experienced programmer looks at code compared to a novice. Seems to be early days, but worth a nod and a smile."
Reader Necroman points out that if the above link is unreachable, try this one. The videos are also available on YouTube: Expert, Novice.
I see Blonde, Brunette,...
At this moment, novice programmers think the network is down. Experienced programmers know the site from TFA has been slashdotted.
I don't even see code anymore. All I see is Blond, Brunette, Redhead ...
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
You don't find this useful?
//if Foos is empty don't do anything
//let's go through the collection and increment the counter
//increment the count
if (Foos != null)
foreach (Foo foo in Foos)
foo.count++;
Just a FYI, the test is really poorly done because the code that the novice and the expert are looking at are different. I can read the Expert's code and figure out what the output should read in no time. The inlined code, on the other hand, I have to do the full iteration for each loop. It's really a test fail.
An article that could have been astounding is on a site that got Slashdotted. Perhaps they need some experienced web programmers.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
I see we had the same college TAs and professors.
No, this is what I get to read // Add 2 seconds to the timer because 1 second is way too short for this situation
timer.add(90);