Experiments in Behavior

The techniques of cognitive psychological experimentation can help resolve specific issues in programming and explore the broader issues of programmer behavior. This paper describes the methodological questions of such ex-perimentation ' a d presents two exploratory experiments: a memorization task and a comparison ofthe arithmetic and logical IF statements in FORTRAN. KEY WORDS: Programming; programmers; psychological experimenta-tions; human factors; cognitive psychology; memorization; conditional branching. The literature and research in programming focus heavily on machine-related issues such as parsing ease, execution efficiency, and character sets, but deal only superficially with human factor issues. The thesis of this paper is that we can and must separate the machine-related issues from the human facto