Usability reports (was RE:tabs do WHAT?)

[Tim Peters]

[Sean Blakey, discovers some old ABC reports available for order
 from http://www.cwi.nl/~steven/abc/publications.html
]

> ...
> 	I have heard many claims about Python's usability and
> the ease of learning python.  While my own experience strongly
> concurs with these claims, I am eager to get my hands on some
> concrete information about this.  Perhaps eventually such
> information would be available from the python.org website?

That presumes there's "concrete information" to be had, though.  AFAIK, the
ABC project was both the first and the last to get funding to study
programming language design as a human factors problem.  Python took some of
its ideas, but is not proceeding the same way.  Guido seems to have trouble
enough getting funding for flashy, whiz-bang ideas like CP4E (let alone
mundane ones like mere UI tweaking <wink>).

The only other concrete info out there I can recall is Matt Conway's
doctoral dissertation, available from

    http://research.microsoft.com/~mconway/dissertation.htm

This is mostly about the Alice system (teaching 3D graphics programming
techniques to newbies), and is a darned good read; a variant of Python
serves as Alice's programming language.

for-personal-research-try-teaching-one-newbie-python-and-
    another-one-perl-ly y'rs  - tim

PS:  I would object to my tax dollars being used to fund such a predictable
study <wink>.