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Background reading
Our goal with Maria is to provide an ideal code-editing and code-presentation interface. To do this, we are pulling from prior research.
Learning programming by drawing shapes
- Henderson's Functional Geometry (1982)
- SICP's picture language (1984)
- Quick: an Introduction to Racket With Pictures (?)
Language levels (providing different levels of a programming language to students as they progress):
General
- Alan Kay, A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages
- Bootstrap Introduction to Programming
- SICP, especially the presentation of its introductory lecture, its use of a picture language, and its principled step-by-step syntax-ignorant progression from idea to idea
- How to Design Programs, 2nd Ed.
- Creative Scala, as a longer and more winding but still playful picture-based exploration of a language
- Various Constructivist theories of education from Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner and Seymour Papert.
The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin is a fine read that concentrates on tools that fade into the background and become an intuitive part of the user. His work on the Canon Cat and, later, Archy is full of good stuff. The TL;DR is:
- avoid modes
- rely on the keyboard as much as possible
- navigate with incremental search/something like "ace jump mode" in emacs
Emacs embodies many of the design ideas discussed in Raskin's work, but -- sadly -- has an implementation that is overly tied to the technical limitations of CRTs.
Nielsen group - https://www.nngroup.com/articles/icon-usability/
- universally understood icons are rare
- users simply don't click icons that they don't understand
- icons need a text label
Orbitz - https://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2006/02/20/orbitz-cant-get-a-date/
- users learn the location of buttons more readily than their content (this explains why I find the default ProseMirror menus problematic: buttons appear and disappear based on context, instead of remaining visible, but fading out, so you can't rely on position)
Bruce Tognazzini, Apple, talking about balancing the tensions of friendly vs utilitarian (http://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html):
Contrary to my previously-held position, I no longer believe Apple should get rid of the Dock. It's just too pretty there in the store, and it does help set Mac apart from the more utilitarian appearance of Windows... You want that in sales. You want a visibly-apparent manifestation of the personality of the underlying technology...
A certain class of Apple users—those who check their email once or twice a week and sometimes need to print an attached photo—may need nothing more than the Dock.
The rest of us need more powerful tools, so, Apple, leave the Dock as the smashing demo it is, but also supply some serious, information-dense tools. You have the talent and wherewithal to make such tools as attractive as the Dock if only you will cease seeing this one single object as a complete solution.