Lambda the Ultimate

Programming languages are ultimately interfaces for people to interact with the world of computational possibilities. In that backdrop, I've recently been interested in the influence of cognitive models on programming language design and would like to hear the thoughts of the tU community on the topic.

I think the recent rise of DSLs warrants more research in this area. Past work has been largely populated by debates on completeness, compiling vs. interpreting, efficiency, dynamic vs. static, typed vs. untyped, parallel vs. sequential, distribution, designer idiosyncrasies and, not to mention, elegant vs. ugly.

While I don't deny the importance of the debates, the only one that comes anywhere near the territory of cognitive models is this notion of "elegance", but that's (as far as I know) never dealt with formally.

I see a few areas of work here -

1. Bringing schemes from models of brain function and cognition to programming languages.
2. Using findings of cognitive psychology in designing aspects of programming languages
3. Studying how we model the languages that we use and "like" - i.e. cognitive modeling of programming languages.

(Maybe others strike you.)

For an example of (1), Drescher's schema building mechanism seems a very interesting angle to building interfaces to the world of computation. (see Made-up Minds) .. and it does look like people are trying to apply that approach to special areas. Production rules (grammars) are another category. Of course, one can't forget Prolog.

AppleScript and Hypercard are simple examples of (2), 'cos they were intended to be usable by non-computer science folk and yet are powerful enough scripting languages. Elements of the language such as "tell ...", and "it" exploit our ability to refer to "at hand" and relative entities without much effort. The Logo world and, particularly, Scratch must be mentioned too. I myself got interested in this topic after I worked on adding "the" and "it" to my own scheme toy and found some cognitive modeling results such as working memory size useful in determining usage boundaries.

(3) is interesting as part of the design iteration loop.

Thots?

---
Link summary (extracted from posts) -

1. Chris Barker
2. Inform (language for interactive fiction)