Psychological Issues in End-User Programming

Psychological research into the usability of programming languages and environments, and the cognitive processes that must be supported to improve their usability, has been conducted for over 30 years [dating at least to Weinberg’s (1971) book “The Psychology of Computer Programming”]. For the past 15 years, there have been two permanent research communities devoted to this topic: the Psychology of Programming Interest Group in Europe (www.ppig.org) and the Empirical Studies of Programmers Foundation in America. This chapter presents a survey of the research that has been conducted in those communities, the relationship between that research and end-user development, case studies of shared research themes, and design approaches that have arisen from these themes. In this chapter, I will refer to the work of both communities under the generic term “psychology of programming,” although as will become clear later, this term is not completely adequate.

Key words. psychology, programming, end-users, education, spreadsheets, scripting, design models