[Idle-dev] Research on shell vs. editor

[Bruce Sherwood]

Ruth Chabay reminds me that Sharon Carver at Carnegie Mellon did a study on 
young kids using LOGO in the classroom which bears on the issue of shell 
vs. editor.

She found that the kids were NOT writing programs, they were just issuing 
direct commands in a shell to the "turtle" to move on the screen (turn 
right; turn left; etc.). She found  that the kids never did acquire a real 
sense of a program or an algorithm.

There is a huge learning value in having the whole program in front of you, 
recording exactly what led to the results of the most recent run, as 
opposed to trying to disentangle the history of shell manipulations.

Again, this is not to imply that experts shouldn't have a shell option 
available if they find it useful. It is a further plea that for the (what 
we hope to be a much larger number of) nonexperts a highly interactive 
editor is vastly preferable.

Bruce