The program plan (Spohrer et al, 1985) has been widely accepted as a description of programming knowledge. This paper presents an empirical test of their psychological reality and the first comparison of plan structures across languages.
Subjects with 2-3 years’ programming experience attempted to find deliberately introduced bugs of four types, one of which was bugs in plans. Graphic cues were used to highlight plan structures and/or control structures in a fully crossed design. Highlighting control structures improved the detection of control bugs in both Pascal and Basic, but only Pascal programmers benefitted from the highlighting of plan structures, showing an increase in the detection of plan bugs.
We conclude that the ‘plan’ is a good description of Pascal programming knowledge. Can it be that Basic programmers do not use plans? That would be surprising because the structure of the programs was the same. We suggest that Basic programmers may use plans, but that the Basic notation is less “role-expressive”, making it harder to identify plans and process them mentally. Research on other programming languages (eg. Prolog) is urgently needed if we are to confirm the plan as psychologically real.
The program plan (Spohrer et al, 1985) has been widely accepted as a description of programming knowledge. This paper presents an empirical test of their psychological reality and the first comparison of plan structures across languages.
Subjects with 2-3 years’ programming experience attempted to find deliberately introduced bugs of four types, one of which was bugs in plans. Graphic cues were used to highlight plan structures and/or control structures in a fully crossed design. Highlighting control structures improved the detection of control bugs in both Pascal and Basic, but only Pascal programmers benefitted from the highlighting of plan structures, showing an increase in the detection of plan bugs.
We conclude that the ‘plan’ is a good description of Pascal programming knowledge. Can it be that Basic programmers do not use plans? That would be surprising because the structure of the programs was the same. We suggest that Basic programmers may use plans, but that the Basic notation is less “role-expressive”, making it harder to identify plans and process them mentally. Research on other programming languages (eg. Prolog) is urgently needed if we are to confirm the plan as psychologically real.