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Back to proposals-2013
Title: Code as a crime scene
Proposer: adam_petersen
Type: Tutorial
Duration: 90 minutes
Description: Software design is at the edge of our cognitive capabilities. In his classic talk at the Turing awards, Dijkstra remarked that computer programming is an “intellectual challenge which will be without precedent in the cultural history of mankind”.
This session will look into those intellectual challenges on both individual and social levels. We'll identify the cognitive constraints, the social pitfalls and the individual factors at work during programming. The goal is to come up with recommendations for software designs that fit the way our brain works. It will be recommendations for designs optimized for learning, reasoning, collaboration and understanding.
The material will be based on research from cognitive, social, and personal psychology. We'll see how the findings map to the challenges of design and the empirical studies of programming. I'll probably throw some findings from the fascinating field of the psychology of attractiveness into the mix too. As far as code goes, I'll give some examples in Lisp, Erlang, and JavaScript to see how the solutions match the psychological principles and how they influence our design space.
Ewan: MAYBE. Looks in the same ballpark as “An Exploration of the Phenomenology of Software Development” - room for only one of them?
Roger: I agree
Asti: sounds interesting