Programmer Research

[John J. Jordan]

Hello,

My name is John Jordan and I am a researcher in the Computer Science
Division at the University of California, Berkeley. Under the
supervision of Professor Susan L. Graham, I have developed a tool that
enables programmers to compose and modify code with fewer keystrokes,
with the goals of speeding up coding and helping those with RSI. I
would like to invite you to take part in a survey intended to evaluate
the usefulness of this tool.

The survey is online and will take approximately 10 minutes. During the
survey, you will be asked a few questions about your habits and
experiences with programming tasks.

If you have any questions about the survey, you may contact me by
e-mail: (e-mail address removed). If you have any questions regarding
your treatment or rights as a participant in this research project,
please contact the University of California at Berkeley's Committee for
Protection of Human Subjects at (510) 642-7461 or
(e-mail address removed).


The survey is online at http://sequoia.cs.berkeley.edu/survey/


Thank you,

John J. Jordan
Harmonia Research Project
Computer Science Division
University of California, Berkeley

 

[Richard Heathfield]

John J. Jordan said:

The survey is online and will take approximately 10 minutes. During the
survey, you will be asked a few questions about your habits and
experiences with programming tasks.

The survey is online at http://sequoia.cs.berkeley.edu/survey/

And I quote...

"Not Found

"The requested URL /survey was not found on this server.


"Apache/1.3.33 Server at sequoia.cs.berkeley.edu Port 80"

Thank you,

You're welcome.

 

[John J. Jordan]

Richard Heathfield wrote:
-cut-

And I quote...

"Not Found

"The requested URL /survey was not found on this server.

Mind the trailing slash. Apache is a bit anal.

You're welcome.

-JJ

 

[Richard Heathfield]

John J. Jordan said:

Richard Heathfield wrote:
-cut-

Mind the trailing slash.

Ah, that was it. (Strange - after all, I clicked on the link. Oh well.)


Seemed like a reasonable survey to me. Better-designed than most, although I
think I detected just a hint of leading in some of the questions.

 

[Burton Samograd]

Hello,

The survey is online at http://sequoia.cs.berkeley.edu/survey/

The survey doesn't work in emacs-w3m (the next links don't do
anything) and I'm too lazy to fire up X, firefox, copy and paste the
link. Sorry but it would be nice if it was accessable to those that
prefer the console (and I would think type a lot more, and would
probably going to skew your data anyway .

 

[Vladimir Oka]

Richard Heathfield opined:

John J. Jordan said:


Ah, that was it. (Strange - after all, I clicked on the link. Oh
well.)


Seemed like a reasonable survey to me. Better-designed than most,
although I think I detected just a hint of leading in some of the
questions.

I'd say a little biased towards OO languages. AFAIR, one of the central
questions (about the amount of bother for various tasks) had only two
or three options out of a dozen or so that was not OO specific.

Otherwise, yes, better than a few I've seen.

--
"Oh, I've seen copies [of Linux Journal] around the terminal room at
The Labs."
(By Dennis Ritchie)

<http://clc-wiki.net/wiki/Introduction_to_comp.lang.c>

 

[John J. Jordan]

Vladimir Oka wrote:
-cut-

I'd say a little biased towards OO languages. AFAIR, one of the central
questions (about the amount of bother for various tasks) had only two
or three options out of a dozen or so that was not OO specific.

While my first prototype of the tool targeted C, its current incarnation
is written in Java, for Java. Among the reasons for this is a grant
from IBM and Harmonia's lack of decent C analysis (thanks, preprocessor
. We think we know ways to get around the latter issue, but we are
too low on personnel to do so.

That would explain the bias towards OO, but I could have admittedly done
better with some of the questions. The two languages that see heavy use
at Berkeley right now are Scheme (intro courses) and Java (most
everything else, even OS). It troubles me.. I grew up on C. To top it
off, I know that I'll be working with managed code for at least the
foreseeable future.

Otherwise, yes, better than a few I've seen.

Thanks for the remarks,
JJ