Visual programming in the wild: A survey of LabVIEW programmers
As part of research into the cognitive effects of visual programming representations, a worldwide survey of LabVIEW programmers was conducted via the World Wide Web and resulted in 227 survey responses. The survey questionnaire was designed to allow some distinction between opinions about the visual aspects of LabVIEW and opinions about LabVIEW's many other features; this paper presents an analysis of this collected data, including both the opinions of the visual and non-visual aspects. Throughout the analysis, comparisons are made from the survey data both to Green's cognitive dimensions and to Green and Petre's own assessment of LabVIEW [1, 2]. Overall, the respondents were positive in their assessment of LabVIEW. Moreover, of interest to the visual programming community, respondents rated the value of LabVIEW's visual language significantly higher than the value of all other LabVIEW features rated in this survey (including LabVIEW's extensive libraries of reusable code). At the same time, respondents' comments suggest many other possible sources of LabVIEW's success such as LabVIEW's libraries of reusable code, LabVIEWS's support for building GUIs, LabVIEW's use of the dataflow paradigm and LabVIEW's automatic memory management. By identifying these non-visual aspects of a VPL, this research hopes to contribute to future, rigorous investigation of the impact of visual programming representations. (C) 2001 Academic Press.
labview cognitive dimensions empirical evaluation