Articulating the ineffable. Programming language theory 
cognitive psychology. PhD @Stanford
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Excited to announce my debut PL/HCI paper appearing at CHI'21: "The Role of Working Memory in Program Tracing". Ever found it hard to remember stuff while you read a program? That's working memory! Check out our experiments exploring this phenomenon. https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.06305 pic.twitter.com/CEZ7VBrSm6
Worth noting that I'm a 5th year PhD student, and this is my first ever first-author conference paper (along with a SIGCSE'21 pub I'll announce later). Lest you get demoralized by those undergrads coming in with first-author best paper awards :-)
I switched fields fairly late in my PhD (end of year 3). I worked on systems for a while, but I found myself put off by the purely technical focus of the community. I would always drift back to the human factors that defined why systems matter.https://twitter.com/wcrichton/status/1296526104010792962 …
My ultimate goal is to design programming tools that are learnable and usable. But there's a terrible dearth of methodologies for understanding these concepts in relation to programming, leading to theories like "fewer LOC == more intuitive".https://twitter.com/wcrichton/status/1274407812144095233 …
My hope is that we can learn from cognitive science -- theories of working memory, perception, problem solving -- to better understand what makes programming difficult today. Then we can design a better tomorrow.
whoa this looks awesome! definitely adding this to our reading list for the semester.
let me know when you figure out how to upgrade working memory, I'm a few cache lines short
Fun fact, CMU researchers once spent two years training a random undergrad to recall back 80 digits in order. That could be you! https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a114635.pdf …
I like the margin note idea! Your paper should be read by UX'ers! They can translate this into tangible tools. Thank you!
It's so refreshing to see research into one of my all time favorite activities -- debugging. So challenging, and so rewarding, but certainly purely some combination of intuition and experience on my part, but not any sort of research based methodology. Keep calm & carry on! #:')
Nice work! I wonder if some of the high performers were more experienced, so they were able to chunk the tracing process into fewer parts. Maybe tools could be made to help people learn to chunk faster.
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