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From: billh@hplsla.HP.COM (Bill Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Language Use
Message-ID: <11210001@hplsla.HP.COM>
Date: 18 Mar 91 20:01:58 GMT
References: <1150@ra.MsState.Edu>
Organization: HP Lake Stevens, WA
Lines: 42

I just found an article by Curtis, Sheppard, Kruesi-Bailey, Bailey, and
Boehm-Davis entitled "Experimental Evaluation of Software Documentation
Formats", published in "The Journal of Systems and Software", vol. 9, pp.
167-207, 1989.  Briefly, they studied the effectiveness of certain types of
software problem-solving behavior as a function of documentation formats
and styles.

On page 198-199, they describe how they removed the effect of programmer
variability from the results of their study.  They found that the number of
years of professional programming experience did not correlate to
performance on any of the 4 experiments they ran.  On the other hand, the
number of languages the programmer had used did correlate positively with
success on 2 of the 4, and it was on the borderline of significance on a
third.  

They claim this is consistent with reports in a prior study ("Modern Coding
Practices and Programmer Performance" by Sheppard, Curtis, Milliman, and
Love in "Computer", vol. 12, no. 12, pp. 41-49, 1979), which showed that
the number of years of programming performance didn't correlate with
performance, but breadth of programming experience (number of programming
languages known, etc.) did.  (I have not yet read this article.)

Incidentally, the subjects (programmers) in the 1989 report were all
professional Fortran programmers with an average of over 5 years
professional experience.

My conclusion is that you should pick the concepts which you wish to teach
and then select a language which is effective at teaching those concepts
and meets other constraints which you may have, as one of the other posters
mentioned.  It would only seem beneficial for students to be exposed to a
variety of languages over their careers at the university.  Having hired
software engineers in the past, I can say that a person's understandings of
the fundamentals was more important than whether or not they already knew
the language we were using at the time.

Bill Harris
billh%hplsla@hplabs.hp.com      

Hewlett-Packard Co. 
Lake Stevens Instrument Division ms/230
8600 Soper Hill Road
Everett, WA 98205-1298