I’m at the Psychology of Programming Interest Group 17th Annual Meeting, as I blogged earlier. The photos (taken by John Sung and emailed to me for posting; thanks John) show a few vignettes from the gig and the Thursday night sushi dinner at Moshi Moshi in Brighton.

I’ve been way outside this community for a long time, and arrived rather smugly thinking that this would be a kind of trip down memory lane. Boy was I ever wrong.

It’s a small group (only about 25 in the room right now as I’m writing this), with an astonishingly high percentage of nice, smart, and productive people (I shouldn’t be astonished, but it’s rare to go to conferences where the percentage approaches 100%). One of the first talks I attended, by Alan Blackwell, immediately blew us away with a video clip taken from a session illustrating Live Coding in Laptop Music performance: code-hacking in real time, wherein the code (1) affects the music you’re listening to and (2) the code is displayed up on a large screen as it’s being rewritten. Check out www.toplap.org to get a sense of what these guys and gals are up to.

Lots of other neat stuff… Luke Church talking about Dasher: a continues gesture IDE; sessions on collaborative programming; nice studies from Pamela O’Shea, Deirdre Carew, Chris Exton and their colleagues at the University of Limerick in Ireland looking at professional programmers and the way they communicate with source code excerpts in their distributed group discussions; a very strong contingent from The University of Joensuu in Finland (Jorma Sajaniemi and colleagues) doing some nice work with program animation and teaching of novices based around the concept of making fully explicity the 10 different roles that variables can play; and lots more.

Have a look at the PPIG 2005 site where you can access PDF versions of the papers.

Technorati Tags: ppig, psychology, programming

You can leave a response below, or trackback from your own site. You can follow responses to this entry through the Comments (RSS 2.0) Feed.