Follow-up post explaining research rationale

[Joe Duarte via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 10 May 2016 at 13:40:30 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Monday, 9 May 2016 at 19:09:35 UTC, Joe Duarte wrote:
> [snip]
>> Let me give you a sense of the sorts of issues I'm thinking 
>> of. Here is a C sample from ProgrammingSimplified.com. It 
>> finds the frequency of characters in a string:
>>
>> int main()
>> {
>>    char string[100];
>>    int c = 0, count[26] = {0};
>>
>>    printf("Enter a string\n");
>>    gets(string);
>>
>>    while (string[c] != '\0')
>>    {
>>       /** Considering characters from 'a' to 'z' only
>>           and ignoring others */
>>
>>       if (string[c] >= 'a' && string[c] <= 'z')
>>          count[string[c]-'a']++;
>>
>>       c++;
>>    }
>>
>>    for (c = 0; c < 26; c++)
>>    {
>>       /** Printing only those characters
>>           whose count is at least 1 */
>>
>>       if (count[c] != 0)
>>          printf("%c occurs %d times in the entered 
>> string.\n",c+'a',count[c]);
>>    }
>>
>>    return 0;
>> }
>>
> [snap]
>
> I went to www.programmingsimplified.com/c-program-examples and 
> found that this was example 48 out of 59. The examples start 
> with:
>
> - Hello world
> - Print Integer
> - Addition
> - Odd or Even
> - Add, subtract, multiply and divide
> - Check vowel
> - Leap year
> - Add digits
> - [...]
>
> and so on, with increasing complexity.
>
> Nobody starts with examples like the one above. More likely 
> with number 1 in their list:
>
> #include <stdio.h>
>
> int main()
> {
>   printf("Hello world\n");
>   return 0;
> }
>
> Not so difficult to understand.


You're arguing that the 32-line example on finding characters 
frequency in a string was too complicated? I think it might help 
to clarify my purpose in that post. It was to pick a random 
example of a simple C program to illustrate the sorts of problems 
programming syntax has from a cognitive science and pedagogical 
standpoint. For my purposes, I didn't need to choose a 6-line 
program, and something that short would probably undermine my 
ability to illustrate some things.

Note also that I saw myself as being a bit *charitable* to C by 
choosing that sample. For instance, I didn't use an example 
littered with the word "void". Void in English most commonly 
means invalid, canceled, or not binding, as in a voided check, a 
void contract (such as where one party is a minor), and "null and 
void" is a common usage, so starting a function declaration by 
declaring it void is jarring. There was a discussion that Walter 
linked to from the late 1980s I believe, where people were 
requesting that this issue be fixed in C (Walter linked to it as 
background on the naming of D I think). It's a hole in the type 
system and bad syntax -- I predict that it adds confusion to 
learning a language that uses it.

Something I've wondered is if foreigners actually have an easier 
time with the syntax of English programming languages. The 
jarring usage of terms like void, or things like dollar signs and 
question marks to not mark dollars or questions, might not be 
jarring to non-native English speakers, or non-English speakers. 
For them, all this might just be arbitrary tokens and they'd just 
have to learn what the tokens signify (and it's very interesting 
to think about how they and English speakers learn this). Andreas 
Stefik did some research where he used a randomly generated 
programming syntax, I think it was called Randomo, and some 
mainstream languages were just as hard to learn as the randomly 
generated one (Java or C, I think -- they're both pretty bad 
anyway). To non-English speakers, and especially 
non-Latin-alphabet-users, all of our programming languages might 
be randomly generated for all intents and purposes.

You gave a Hello World example above. Don't get me started on 
Hello World. Well, too late... Here's the deal. It's not just 
Hello World -- a ton of programming examples in online references 
and introductory texts, perhaps most of them, present programs 
that are pointless. By "pointless" I mean they do no useful work. 
Commonly, they repeat something back to us. So here we're typing 
64-ish characters into a console or something in order to have 
the computer repeat back an 11-character string to us. If we have 
to type "Hello World" (and a bunch of other stuff) in order for 
the computer to display it, well we've not had a productive 
interaction.

I think examples should quickly illustrate computers computing or 
otherwise doing productive things for us. Displaying a string in 
a console environment is also too far removed from normal 
computing environments like a smartphone or Windows 10/MacOS 
graphical desktop. If we're going to teach displaying a pop-up 
message, we should cut right to a windowing environment from the 
outset.

I think the Hello World example is also extremely confusing to 
newbies and rational knowers. It's not clear why the main 
function has an integer type, since we're not doing anything with 
integers, why there is an empty set of parentheses after it (what 
are they doing there?), why we're saying "printf" when we don't 
want to use our printer, why there's a newline code *inside the 
quotes*, why we are "returning" 0, and what that even means, and 
of course why there are curly braces just sitting there on 
otherwise blank lines. We just wanted to display "Hello World", 
not deal with all this other stuff.