Experimental Comparison of the Effectiveness and Error Rates of Projectional and Text Editors

Authors Tomáš Petro, Jaroslav Porubän



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Author Details

Tomáš Petro
  • Department of Computers and Informatics, Technical University of Košice, Slovakia
Jaroslav Porubän
  • Department of Computers and Informatics, Technical University of Košice, Slovakia

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Tomáš Petro and Jaroslav Porubän. Experimental Comparison of the Effectiveness and Error Rates of Projectional and Text Editors. In 13th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2024). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 120, pp. 5:1-5:9, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2024.5

Abstract

Editors can significantly influence user experience, as well as factors such as programming speed and the occurrence of syntactic errors. Given our experience in programming in the projectional editor MPS, which we believe offers numerous advantages, we decided to conduct an experiment involving students with limited programming experience. The aim was to determine if a novice programmer could program in projectional editor more effectively than in traditional text editor.
A total of 83 first-year computer science students from our university participated in the experiment. The methodology encompassed the selection of an appropriate programming language for the experiment, customization of the language’s editor, preliminary trials, the main experiment, and concluding evaluations of speed and error rates associated with both editors. Additionally, the study sought insights into whether students exhibited a preference for programming in a projectional editor or adhering to a classic text editor paradigm.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Integrated and visual development environments
Keywords
  • Text editor
  • Projectional editor
  • Effectiveness
  • Experiment

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References

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