Are Programmers People?

Ken Arnold:

If we accept that programmers are humans, one primary and interesting consequence is that human factors issues can be properly applied towards the tools they use.…I am speaking about the more basic tools programmers use every minute they do their work: programming languages and APIs.

Consider garbage collection. One can argue up and down about the overhead, etc., but consider this: Two of the best selling C++ books are Scott Meyer’s Effective C++ and More Effective C++. The single largest category of the 85 tips—about one quarter of them—is dealing with potential memory leaks.…This is fundamentally a human factors problem: You can tell people how to avoid the whirling knives of the abattoir, or you can close the abattoir door.

(via Ned Batchelder)

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