Physiological And Perceptual Factors
These are physiological and perceptual factors that may affect how effectively an individual relates to a given software design technique and programming language. These are generally factors resistant to small-to-medium amounts training in an individual.
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Visual-Oriented - This kind of person prefers physical placement and visual cues to convey information. Characteristics of this include:
- Code layout and indentation is important to them
- Often prefer similar items aligned in a tabular formation and/or table-oriented storage and/or tracking of common attributes for a given item.
- Likes to be able to re-project information into a formal that visually emphasizes factors being studies at a given moment. This includes graph/charting techniques, and query languages.
- Prefers to see relationships between units or items as physical links (lines and arrows) rather than rely on a linguistic form, such as named references. Thus, they like meta-friendly systems that separate rule structure from rule presentation.
- Adept at inventing and using charts and graphs to discover suspicious or telling patterns in large amounts of information.
- Is easily "tricked" by similar-looking but different syntax.
- Likes to communicate via charts, diagrams, and cartoon-based idioms.
- Thinks a GraphicalProgrammingLanguage is a good idea, at least as a "presentation option" (see above).
- visual-oriented people tend to translate information into visual idioms internally, process it as visual idioms, and then convert back to the desired output form (if not already visual) when communicating.
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Linguistic-Oriented - This kind of person is adept at perceiving studying information in a linguistic fashion. Characteristics of this include:
- Less selective about formatting than the visual-oriented person (above). Their mind can quickly adjust to presentation and placement changes or differences.
- Wishes to use "rich" programming languages that use complex linguistic rules to process information and prevent or detect problems.
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Thinks a GraphicalProgrammingLanguage is a bad idea.
- Not really. To a Linguistic-Oriented fellow, being 'less selective' about formatting often extends to not being particularly concerned whether the code is formatted graphically. More to the point, this kind of person is unlikely to be impressed just because the language is graphical, and will judge the language more by its other properties.
- I intended my mention of GraphicalProgrammingLanguage to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but point taken.
- Linguistic-oriented people tend to translate information into language internally, process it as language, and then convert back to the desired output form (if not already language) when communicating.
A deaf, dumb, blind infant may be a genius, but not think visually or linguistically.
iKeller
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Eyes
- Fast Find - Ability to quickly find strings in large screens of text or lists. People who lack this ability often want better search engines or search techniques to find and highlight candidate matches.
- Degenerative Eye Diseases -
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Hand
- CarpalTunnelSyndrome - This is a repetitive motion injury that may hamper one's ability to use the keyboard or mouse. People with CTS may rely more visual inspection to reduce the need to move fingers. For example, they may use a higher screen resolution to reduce the need to scroll (perhaps wearing out their eyes faster via such trade-off).
- Poor Typist - Although training can generally over-come this; until remedied, the person's behavior may resemble that of those with CTS (above). However, they tend to rely on the mouse much more than CTS, because CTS tends to affect mousing also (eventually).