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fa.works
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Fri Feb 19 12:51:57 1982
Perceived Complexity of computer and/or text editing systems
>From JONL@MIT-MC Fri Feb 19 12:22:00 1982
Re Your quest:
Date: 17 February 1982 1639-EST (Wednesday)
From: Jeff.Shrager at CMU-10A
To: works at MIT-MC, human-nets at MIT-MC, *tens at MIT-MC
Subject: Perceived or actual complexity of systems
I am seeking pointers to papers etc on the actual or perceived complexity
of programming languages, systems, interfaces, or processes relating to
computers (debugging, editing, etc). Are there any good dimensions along
which to measure perceived complexity? Have any experiments been done to
measure this? (Note that the kind of complexity that we are interested in
is not directly related to complexity of algorithms whose metric is of the
sort: NSquared, or NLogN. Rather, we are looking for measures in terms of
learning curves, or funnction use statistics (or anything else that might
indicate this sort of "human" complexity, not "mathematical" complexity)).
I'd reccomend looking at a paper by Beau Sheil of XEROX Palo Alto
Research Center "Coping With Complexity", CIS-15 (ssl-81-4) April 1981.
Also someone else at Xerox did a recent PhD thesis about the
complexity of using text editing systems (maybe Terry Roberts?); probably Beau
can give you pointers.
Dr. Beau Sheil
XEROX Palo Alto Research Center
2400 Hanover St.
Palo Alto CA
Arpa-Net: SHEIL@PARC-MAXC
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