What I mean by "psychology of programming" is broadly the application of psychological methods to understanding the process of programming. What are some interesting empirical results of such research?
Some examples of the kind of research I would be looking for:
- What are some key factors that affect comprehension of programs? How would those factors differ within each programming paradigm?
- How much of a measurable impact does a particular syntax of a programming language (e.g. python vs. lisp vs. C-style) have on program comprehension?
- Is there good empirical evidence that particular programming no-no's (GOTOs, global variables, etc.) actively hinder program comprehension?
I'm not necessarily interested in answers to those particular questions - I could obviously google for specific answers to specific questions. Instead, I would ideally like to know if there exist good meta-analyses which would aggregate findings in broader areas of said research and serve as starting points for further investigation.
Thanks!
It has been retracted, but the retraction applies only to the grander claims made based on the results. The experimental results have been replicated several times, and to my knowledge have not failed replication in meaningful ways. (One study, for instance, found "no effect" because the cohort scored ~100% on the assessment questions, which means any useful variance was above the test ceiling.)
You can find the paper here (http://wiki.t-o-f.info/uploads/EDM4600/The%20camel%20has%20t...), a good-if-overzealous discussion here (https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-f...) and the pseudo-retraction here (http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hu...).