THE NATURE AND DEVELOPMENT OF PROGRAMMING PLANS

The notion of the programming plan as a description of one of the main types of strategy employed in the comprehension of programs is now widely accepted to form an adequate basis for an account of programming knowledge. Such plans are thought to be used universally in all programming languages by expert programmers. Recent work, however, has questioned the psychological reality of such plans and has suggested that they may be artifacts of the particular programming language used and the structure that it imposes on the programmer via the constraints of certain features of its notation. This paper considers the results of two experimental studies that suggest that the development and use of programming plans is strongly tied to the particular learning experience of the programmer. It is argued that programming plans cannot be considered solely to be natural strategies that evolve independently of teaching nor as mere artifacts or static properties of a particular programming language. Rather, such plans can be seen to be related to the expression of design-related skills. This has a number of important implications for our understanding of the nature and development of programming plans, and in particular, it appears that the notion of the programming plan provides too limited a view to adequately and straightforwardly explain the differences between novice and the expert's programming performance. © 1990 Academic Press Limited.