diff --git a/productivity.html b/productivity.html index 56ed628..2406dcd 100644 --- a/productivity.html +++ b/productivity.html @@ -52,8 +52,8 @@ Another dimension of productivity is learning. Great engineers are resourceful, quick learners (Li et al. 2015). New engineers must be even more resourceful, even though their instincts are often to hide their lack of expertise from exactly the people they need help from (Begel & Simon 2008). - Experienced developers know that learning is important and now rely heavily on social media such as Twitter to follow industry changes, build learning relationships, and discover new concepts and platforms to learn (Singer et al. 2012). - And, of course, developers now rely heavily on web search to fill in inevitable gaps in their knowledge about APIs, error messages, and myriad other details about languages and platforms (Xia et al. 2017). + Experienced developers know that learning is important and now rely heavily on social media such as Twitter to follow industry changes, build learning relationships, and discover new concepts and platforms to learn (Singer et al. 2012). + And, of course, developers now rely heavily on web search to fill in inevitable gaps in their knowledge about APIs, error messages, and myriad other details about languages and platforms (Xia et al. 2017).

Unfortunately, learning is no easy task. One of my earliest studies as a researcher investigated the barriers to learning new programming languages and systems, finding six distinct types of content that are challenging (Ko & Myers 2004). To use a programming platform successfully, people need to overcome design barriers, which are the abstract computational problems that must be solved, independent of the languages and APIs. People need to overcome selection barriers, which involve finding the right abstractions or APIs to achieve the design they have identified. People need to overcome use and coordination barriers, which involve operating and coordinating different parts of a language or API together to achieve novel functionality. People need to overcome comprehension barriers, which involve knowing what can go wrong when using part of a language or API. And finally, people need to overcome information barriers, which are posed by the limited ability of tools to inspect a program's behavior at runtime during debugging. Every single one of these barriers has its own challenges, and developers encounter them every time they are learning a new platform, regardless of how much expertise they have.