What Makes Code Hard to Understand?
Posted: 2013-04-26
[arXiv paper] [eyeCode data set]
What factors impact the comprehensibility of code? In this blog post, I'll describe an experiment I did with my advisors Andrew Lumsdaine (Computer Science) and Rob Goldstone (Cognitive Science) at Indiana University.
We asked 162 programmers to predict the output of 10 small Python programs. Each program had 2 or 3 different versions, and we used subtle differences between program versions to demonstrate that seemingly insignificant notational changes can have big effects on correctness and response times. I'll go over some of the results here, hopefully to whet your appetite for the paper.
Modeling How Programmers Read Code
Posted: 2013-01-27
As my fellow Ph.D. student Eric Holk talked about recently in his blog, I've been running eye-tracking experiments with programmers of different experience levels. In the experiment, a programmer is tasked with predicting the output of 10 short Python programs. A Tobii TX300 eye tracker keeps track of their eyes at 300 Hz, allowing me to see where they're spending their time.
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